

^fc^/ iS^^S^ 




THE 

ENGLISH AND FOREIGN 

PHILOSOPHICAL LIBRARY. 



VOLUME IV 



NATUEAL LAW. 



BY/ 



EDITH SIMCOX. 



SECOND EDITION. 



BOSTON: 

HOUGHTON, OSGOOD, & COMPANY. 
1879. 

\ 



If truth be at all within the reach of human capacity, 'tis certain it must 
lie very deep and abstruse ; and to hope we shall arrive at it without pains, 
while the greatest geniuses have failed with the utmost pains, must 
certainly be esteemed sufficiently vain and presumptuous. I pretend to no 
such advantage in the philosophy I am going to unfold, and would esteem 
it a strong presumption against it were it so very easy and obvious. 

Hume's I'reatise of Human Nature. 



CONTENTS. 

i. 

NATURAL LAW. 

PAGB 

Query, "Whether human acts and feelings are subject to law in the 

same sense as the modifications of unconscious natural objects ? 3 
Human feeling presumably so subject as itself a product of physical 

laws ........ 4 

Human will so subject unless human nature is essentially unknow- 
able . . . . . . . .5 

The nature of a thing = the laws of its manifestations . . 5 

Definition of law ....... 6 

Accidental uniformities not to be called a law . . .7 

True laws state the relations between things which are made con- 
stant by otherwise fixed properties in the things related . 8 
The laws imposed on the human will = the dictates of the sum of 

efficient motives . . . . . . .11 

The laws of nature obeyed involuntarily and unconsciously ; positive 

law by deliberate acts of will . . . . .12 

Query, Whether positive law presupposes a lawgiver ? . .13 
The essence of subjection to law consists in the general necessity of 

voluntary obedience to certain commands • . . .14 

The real uniformities of human conduct conditioned by the nature 
of the agent, by his relations with other men, and by his rela- 
tions to things in general . . . 1 5 

II. 

CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LAW. 

Positive law deals with the constant relations of men to each other 

following from their nature as men . . . 19 

Query, Have these relations any common quality ? . 19 

Most general natural law that society could not subsist without law, 

i.e., if all volitions were incalculably unstable . . .20 



viii 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Customary law = a record of the habitual performance, by men of 
the same kind, of actions of the same kind, similar causes 
producing similar effects till some of the conditions vary . 21 
Consciousness of constraint, the characteristic of positive law : acts 
that "have to be done," without desire, in obedience to ex- 
ternal pressure voluntarily submitted to . . .22 
Custom passes into law when uniform practices cease to be instinc- 
tive, and men become conscious of the generality of an usage 
as a motive for conforming to it, or a deterrent from its breach 24 
When customs have become divergent, the will of the community 

expresses itself through a special official organ . . .25 

Influence of political centralisation on legislation . . .27 

Distinction between legislation and government . . .28 

Differentiation of sovereign and subject . . . .29 

Law requires the co-operation of two natures, tendencies, or wills, 

i.e., the subject's consent . . . . -3° 

Natural history of primitive potentates, the patriarch and the chief 31 
Law formulates the real relations inter se of the subjects of law . 37 
"Whence the feeling that natural constancies of relation " ought " to 

be maintained ? . . . . . . . .38 

Distinction between fact and law . . . . .41 

Law only gives the rule of life for the normal man . . 43 

Distinction between jus and justa. We ask, both, What is justice ? 

and What kind of actions are just? . . . .46 

Natural selection of possibilities in the direction of equity . . 48 

Littre" and Kant . . . . . 51 

Justice = the best general rule practically applicable . . 52 

No standard of right or justice except the real tendency of the kind 

to its own good . . . . . . -54 

The only " natural right " of individuals what the common good 

requires them to have ..... 59 

Metaphysical theories of the source of legal obligation . . 62 

III. 

MORALITY. 

Sense of obligation = consciousness of causation . . .75 
Habit not a motive . . . . . . 77 

Difficulty of separating the practical and speculative side of moral 

problems ....... 78 

Duty always conceived as relative to a person owning the obligation 79 
Human feelings conditioned by natural facts, and not conversely 83 
Divergent theories of obligation, theistic, sentimental, and utili- 
tarian ........ 85 

Right being relative to the conscience, what is the good commonly 

thought right or moral ? .... 86 



CONTENTS. ix 

PAGE 

Three kinds of good : natural good, or full healthy life . . 87 

Sensible good, or pleasure . . . . . .90 

Moral good, or the pursuit of natural good through obstacles which 

make the pursuit self-conscious . . . . .98 

Such obstacles threefold . . . . . -99 

Utilitarianism fails to motive evolution, or to explain the cases in 

which sensible and natural good do not coincide . . 101 

Natural necessity of self-denial ..... 107 

A morality of some kind — or formula of obligation, imposed by the 
nature of the agent in its fixed relations with the surrounding 
medium — exists necessarily, whatever the nature of its actual 
injunctions . . . . . . 117 

The tendencies commonly called moral, those which conduce to the 

natural good of the kind . . . . .119 

A kind could not subsist with essentially self-destructive tendencies 121 
The sacrifice of the natural good of individuals only liable to become 
moral because men are members of a social body, so that their 
natural perfection includes the discharge of social functions, in 
the manner most conducive to the natural perfection of the 
whole ........ 126 



IV. 

RELIGION. 

The natural history of emotion . . . . 133 

Comparative authority of feeling and reason -. . . 135 

All human knowledge, belief, and perception natural, because ali re- 
ceived through the natural faculties of man . . .136 
Men find themselves affected by forces that are Not-man, and do not 

at once conceive any of these to be unconscious . 139 

Ceremonial observances associated with religion . . . 141 

Religious feeling first a reaction under the apprehension of uncon- 
trollable power ....... 142 

Then under an apprehension of the moral influences of the Not-self 

on man ........ 144 

Agnosticism and the Cultus of the Unknowable . . . 147 

The metaphysics of ignorance . . . . . 151 

Personification of the imagined cause of a felt impression . .154 
Arbitrary grouping of events by each several centre of conscious- 
ness . . . . • . . . . 156 

Emotional vicissitudes explained in the same way as material inci- 
dents . . . , 1 . . . 158 
Historical idolatries . . . „ , , .165 
Dualism ..,.„... 168 
Pantheism 169 



X 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Mystical and natural love and worship . . . .171 

Comte : Humanity great, but not supreme . . . .178 

The religious sentiment one of complete dynamic acquiescence . 182 
Eeligious " conversion " of the will to such acquiescence in the real 

tendency of all that is . . . . . .183 

" Conviction of sin" ...... 185 

Naturalistic piety and its limits ..... 190 

Whether the religious sentiment is equally reasonable in all ages . 193 
Piety most rational when human aspirations after the Best possible 

find themselves most nearly in harmony with the spontaneous 

course of things . . . . . . .196 

Atheistical religion ....... 198 

Eational faith only belief in the reality and trust in the power of 

goodness ....... 200 

Discrepancy between, even, lawful wishes and powers . . 205 



V. 

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF ALTRUISM. 



Eetrospect ........ 


211 


The "sufficient reason" for moral conduct naturally identified with 




the standard of morality ..... 


215 


The standard of Conscience ...... 


216 


Of Utility . . . . . . ... 


217 


Of Perfection . . 


218 


Action instinctive or rational ..... 


220 


Instinctive action disinterested as often as not 


221 


Power of acting develops more freely than power of enjoying 


223 


Power of acting with or upon other men craves exercise as it 




develops . . 


226 


The natural history of Altruism ... 


228 


Social discords accidental ...... 


232 


Social wisdom and virtue consist mainly in harmonising the tenden- 




cies that exist, not in bringing them all into conformity with 




some outer standard ...... 


234 


The general law of social duty enforced by penal sanctions, the force 




of which upon the human will is due to the same tendencies 




which caused the law to be proclaimed .... 


239 



VI. 

THE NATURAL SANCTIONS OF MORALITY. 

Causes and effects inseparable, so the dislike felt for the natural 
consequences of an immoral act, otherwise attractive, acts as a 
sanction of the law against it . . . . 245 



CONTENTS. si 

TAOB 

The natural law against murder and theft .... 246 

Against inconstancy ....... 247 

Against suicide ....... 252 

The natural history of charity ..... 254 

The pleasures of vice ....... 258 

Waste of moral force in the exercises of false religion . . 260 

Doctrine of remission of sins an immoral evasion of the stringency 

of the natural sanction that no accomplished act can be undone 261 
Remorse, the consciousness of having acted against the true nature 265 
Human will gives voice and effect to human nature . . .271 



VII. 

SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 

The best possible attainment, at any given period, a question of fact 275 
Various types of specific excellence only comparable when tried by 

the standard of social serviceableness .... 278 

Mutual dependence of the ruling few and the subservient many . 280 
Alternative vocations : politics, industrialism, art, science, philan- 
thropy ........ 280 

Political ideals : postulates ; that progress is normal and privilege 

unjust : definition of social progress .... 282 

Danger of social disorganisation comes not from the fact of social 

development, but from its partial and unequal extent . . 283 

Popular and providential theories of the function of government . 284 
Differentiation of social functions; self-willed service honourable 

and compulsory obedience base ..... 288 

Natural ability privileged to render the most honourable services . 289 
But beneficial services must be accepted as well as proffered, and so 

far the leaders of society are at the mercy of their followers . 292 
Growing complexity of the social ideal which makes the obligations 



of individuals less clear and notorious .... 295 
The ideal in legislation neither more nor less attainable than the 

ideal in government ...... 300 

Legal rights of property subject to the common interest . . 302 



Effect on proprietary rights of an absolute physical limitation of 

supply in the case of any commodity in demand, e.g., land . 304 

The waiving of anti-social rights a step towards the formation of 

improved social custom which may in time rank as law . 307 



Organisation of public services ..... 308 

Theory of the production and distribution of wealth . . 309 

Natural versus competitive value : cost and utility the essential 

elements ....... 310 

Third element in the price of labour : the WiUe zum Leben of the 

vendor . . . . . . . 311 



xii 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Personal motives not always forthcoming to urge every one to the 



end generally most desirable . . . . . 315 

Inexpedient to interfere with the accidental consequences of un- 
equal natural ability . . . ' . . . 317 
Desirable to substitute a rational estimate of value for the fluctuating 

competitive price ...... 318 

Partition of the " unearned increment " of social wealth . . 318 
Natural value not diminished by increased production, nor real pur- 
chasing power ....... 323 

- Honorary services the natural price of unearned wealth . -325 
The ideal state on all points practically unattainable ; query, Whether 

the best possible be an approach to the unattainable ? . . 32*6 
Demand that ethical theories shall carry with them their application 

to the practical emergencies which concern us . . . 327 
The duty of individuals traced out by the social and the personal 

ideal conjointly ....... 328 

Temporary, reluctant and conditional exaltation of the philan- 
thropic reformer . . . . . .331 

^Esthetic emotion ....... 335 

Positive truth ....... 337 

Moral diffidence of a critical introspective age . . . 339 

The asceticism of secular fastidiousness .... 341 



No real antagonism possible between the claims of social duty and 

individual perfection .' . . . . 344 

Specialisation of function among individuals usually a gain, but 
increasing differentiation of classes a loss, if it extends beyond 
an external division of labour to a radical contrast of nature , ^46 

Personal completeness a condition of the best action, however highly 

specialised ....... 34/ 

VIII 

CONCLUSIONS. 
Pro and Con , . * . - . » 35 2 



Addenda 



363 



I. 



NATURAL LAW. 



"Plerique qui de aifectibus et hominum vivendi ratione scripserunt, 
videntur non de rebus naturalibus, quae communes naturae leges sequuntur, 
sed de rebus, quae extra naturam sunt agere." — Spinoza. 



A 



Query, whether human acts and feelings are subject to law in the same 
sense as the modifications of unconscious natural objects? — Human feel- 
ing presumably so subject as itself a product of physical laws — Human 
will so subject unless human nature is essentially unknowable — The 
nature of a thing = the laws of its manifestations— Definition of law — 
Accidental uniformities not to be called a law — True laws state the rela- 
tions between things which are made constant by otherwise fixed pro- 
perties in the things related — Two things acting on each other modify 
each other in a given fixed way, but one does not impose the necessary 
modification on the other, it follows necessarily from the nature of 
both — The laws imposed on the human will = the dictates of the 
sum of efficient motives — The laws of nature obeyed involuntarily and 
unconsciously ; positive law by deliberate acts of will — Query, whether 
law presupposes a lawgiver? — The essentials of a law generality and 
obeyableness — The general rules which men find it natural and necessary 
to obey, regulate their actions and feelings towards each other, and their 
feelings towards the fixed immaterial conditions of their moral and intel- 
lectual life- 



I. 



NATURAL LAW. 

Any inquiry into the conditions of human existence takes 
for granted that something exists. 

By the existence of a thing we understand only a real 
power of producing and undergoing modification ; and as, 
by human consciousness of existence, we understand only 
the power of perceiving modifications produced or suffered 
by the conscious subject and other real things, it is evident 
that speculation concerning human existence can only be 
concerned with the perceivable modifications suffered or 
produced by human beings. 

The shortest way of stating a case is always the most 
abstract. No simple word, to which we attach clear and 
ready images, will serve to describe both sides of the 
phenomena of life. We may speak of modifications, or 
change and the consciousness of change ; but, saving a few 
metaphysicians, every one will object that change presup- 
poses the existence of things that change; and there is 
no easily intelligible formula for the fact that it is only 
by changes in ourselves that we discern the existence of 
change, or changing things, beyond ourselves. 

The provinces of natural science and moral philosophy 
touch in the problem : Whether the modifications of which 
human beings are conscious in themselves are subject to 
law in the same sense in which the modifications of 
unconscious natural objects are so subject, and whether 
they may become in the same way matter for positive, 
exact knowledge ? 

If consciousness is to be trusted — or in other words, if 



4 



NATURAL LAW. 



the changes of which we are conscious in ourselves are 
in any way a faithful reflection or counterpart of the 
changing relations among other objective existences — one- 
half of our life, that of passive perception, will be as com- 
pletely and knowably subject to law as the orderly natural 
phenomena that we perceive. If, further, the human mind 
is made, as the human body is made, of that which it 
feeds on and assimilates, its long course of orderly per- 
ception will grow — must have grown long since — into an 
organic habit of knowledge, a set of mental predisposi- 
tions, answering to the most general set of outward im- 
pressions. 

As the animal eye is made by the action of the light 
which it perceives upon specially organised matter, so 
the animal mind is made by the perceptions it registers 
through a still higher development of the vital mechanism. 
This natural continuity, or congruity between thought and 
things, fixes the objective place of man, the knowing and 
feeling, in the order of nature, the knowable and sensi- 
ble. But man is not merely a passive register of natural 
phenomena. No natural force is more active and prolific 
than the human will, and we cannot venture, as yet, to 
take for granted that the actions and mental passions of 
men stand in as constant relations to their nature and 
circumstances as their physical feelings and mental per- 
ceptions. 

Human consciousness is beyond doubt a something dis- 
tinct and unique, but it is still an open question whether 
we are to class mental processes on one side and every 
other natural phenomenon on the other, or whether we 
should look on man as only the chief and most interesting 
among the many marvellous products of natural evolution. 
The question is one of vital importance, because all the 
other objects of natural knowledge have points of contact 
amongst themselves; the history of most is in a sense 
continuous, and each object of knowledge stands in de- 
finite, knowable relations to other objects. If man were 



NATURAL LAW. 



5 



the only exception to this universal rule, either his own 
nature must be essentially unknowable, or his life must be 
subject to determination by some extra-natural, unknow- 
able force. But before resorting to such an hypothesis 
we should satisfy ourselves that the simpler view which 
regards man as a part of the natural order wherein he lives 
is unsustainable. 

By the nature of a thing we understand the classes of 
actions (or sufferances) constantly characteristic of it under 
given circumstances, i.e., the laws it follows; and our 
knowledge of everything, from men to molecules, is co- 
extensive with our knowledge of the rules, or laws, accord- 
ing to which they suffer and act, or cause and undergo 
modification. It would appear, therefore, that unless 
human acts and sufferances are subject to law in the same 
sense as the regular modifications of natural objects, they 
cannot become matter of knowledge. In other words, 
knowledge is orderly, and unless human life is orderly, 
mankind is doomed to self-ignorance. 

The difficulty is to frame a definition of law which shall 
include the laws of nature, as conceived by men of science ; 
the laws of human nature, as conceived by philosophers 
and moralists ; and " laws properly so called," or the laws 
of human society, as conceived by jurists and politicians. 
It is not by accident that common speech uses but one 
and the same word to characterise the methods of gravi- 
tating bodies, of scrupulous consciences, and of suitors in 
a civil court. But common speech is inexact, and its 
rough and ready classifications need to be tested. Spe- 
cialists at one extreme call every recurring fact that they 
observe a law, and specialists at the other extreme deny 
the name to the most elaborate statement of fixed deriva- 
tive relations, unless the fixity is secured by the fiat of a 
personal lawgiver; and if both these schools err on the 
side of restriction, the broader customary use of the word 
is too vague and fluctuating for scientific purposes. 

Of all the classical definitions which have been hazarded 



6 



NATURAL LAW. 



of the idea of law, perhaps that of Montesquieu approaches 
most nearly to the desired comprehensiveness ; and it has 
the additional merit of taking nothing for granted save 
the assumption implied in all reasoning, that the data for 
reasoning exist — i.e., that things have definite, knowable 
natures. " Les loix," says the French philosopher, " sont 
les rapports necessaires qui derivent de la nature des 
choses." That is to say, two things acting on each other, 
modify each other in a given fixed way, but one does not 
impose the necessary modification on the other, it follows 
necessarily from the nature of both, as thus related. The 
definition may be faulty, as well as the arguments in 
which the conception recurs; but the first step towards 
clear thinking is to know what we mean by the chief terms 
used, and in the following pages the reader is requested 
always to understand by the term law — " a statement of 
constant relations posited by the nature of things!' 

That there may be constant or apparently constant rela- 
tions, the statement of which is not properly called a law, 
most scientific observers admit. The statement of abso- 
lute stability or absolute change in a single thing out of 
relation to every other, if it could be formulated, would 
not constitute a law, unless the changes repeated them- 
selves in a fixed order, and even then the statement of 
the constant relations observed amongst the changes would 
not be held to constitute a true, or necessary — only an em- 
pirical — law. An empirical law (or generalisation) states 
an observed order in the modifications produced or suffered 
by a given thing, which order, after repeated observations, 
is provisionally assumed to be constant; but the con- 
stancy is not considered to be demonstrated, or the possi- 
bility of exceptions to the law excluded, until that one 
constant relation has been connected with, or explained 
by, or deduced from, those other known constancies of 
relation which form, taken together, what we know as the 
nature of the thing under investigation ; or until unbroken 
experience of the recurring constancy causes it to be in- 



NATURAL LAW. 



7 



eluded in the simple definition, or description of the nature 
of the thing itself. 

Coexistences, however uniform, do not make a law 
unless the coexisting phenomena are traceable to a com- 
mon cause ; for it is not a part of the nature of one thing 
that other quite different things should exist in such and 
such proportions in the same universe with it. A body of 
laws declaring the relations between contemporary effects 
of independent causes would only be conceivable if the 
first elements of all things had been arranged in cosmic 
regularity preparatory to > the evolution of an absolutely 
orderly system. A true law of nature enables us to pre- 
dict with certainty what will happen under given circum- 
stances to any specimen of the class of substances to which 
the law applies. Mere averages which give a general 
summary of results, without distinguishing the causes that 
produce them, do not give a true law, because it is impos- 
sible to predict from them, except approximately and in 
the gross. 

It would be scarcely a caricature of the way in which 
some so-called statistical and historical " laws " are ascer- 
tained, if we were to mark the rate of motion of a number 
of glaciers in different parts of the world, and then strike 
an average and call the result the " law of glacial motion 
or if we noted the order and rapidity with which places 
with a " season " fill and empty, and then supposed our- 
selves to have discovered a " law" of fashionable migration. 
"When there is no permanent connection in nature between 
the various sources of the conditions necessary to the 
observed result, the result itself is, properly speaking, 
accidental or contingent, and predictions respecting its 
recurrence or reproduction must be conditional on the 
incalculable persistence of stable relations amongst those 
causes which we call ultimate because we do not know 
their constant antecedents, or whether they have any. 

The only scientific laws to which we can easily ascribe 
a logical or metaphysical necessity, comparable to that of 



8 



NATURAL LAW. 



the truths of geometry, are those which presuppose certain 
other fixities of relation. Thus an observed regularity in 
the movement of light or sound is rationally called a law 
of optics or acoustics when it has been connected with a 
broader physical law of motion in general. Given such a 
law, each new observation concerning the motion of bodies 
must be either an example of the law, or an exception 
to it, and the original law, though itself only empirical, 
acquires new force when it has been found that new cases 
always illustrate and confirm its truth, and that the assump- 
tion that it will be found true in each case that arises is 
never found to mislead in practice. The laws, then, which 
we think of as necessary, that is to say, of actual universal 
cogency, are either such as state a constancy of relations 
amongst relations, or those which state a simple relation 
from which it has been found possible to draw inferences 
respecting other facts and relations that admit and receive 
subsequent verification. 

In no other way can we be assured that the constancy 
of relations is not accidental, but really posited by the 
nature of the things of which we wish to know the laws : 
or, if the distinction between the nature of a thing and the 
laws of its nature appears trivial, in no other way can we 
have experience of the existence of different kinds of things. 
But if we take from science the tolerably elementary fact 
that distinguishable kinds of things do exist, we soon find 
a point of contact with the jurists ; for, as is generally 
allowed, we do not know things in themselves, and when 
we distinguish an object as being of a certain kind, we do 
not predicate anything concerning its essence, only con- 
cerning what may be called its actions, its manifestations, 
the modifications which it is capable of producing or suf- 
fering. 

Now the orthodox lawyer's definition of a law is "a 
command binding to actions of a class;" and it would 
therefore seem that the only difference between a true 
positive law and a law of nature is that the latter declares, 



NATURAL LAW. 



9 



instead of commanding, what class of actions will, under 
given conditions, certainly be performed (or suffered) by 
the subject of the law. But the wisdom of our ancestors, 
as evidenced in etymology, does not favour the modern 
assumption that it was essential to a law to be imposed, 
or laid down, by word of mouth or writing, by a personal 
legislator ; it was enough for it to be imposed or " put ; " 
and the observed relations of the natural world may, with 
perfect propriety, be spoken of as " posited " by the nature 
of the things which are, as a fact, related thus and not 
otherwise, and which would, we take for granted, be dif- 
ferently related if they themselves were different, since 
difference and resemblance are but words by which we 
express the real or apparent relations of things. 

The ridicule cast by Austin upon " Ulpian's law of 
nature" may be explained by the strong and perfectly 
well-founded feeling of lawyers, that consciousness of con- 
straint or recognition of authority is an essential element 
in the obedience paid to human law as such. The concep- 
tion of Nature, as a lawgiver, instructing all the members 
of the animal world in their respective rights and duties, 
is sufficiently fantastical ; but it is not certain, though the 
words will bear that interpretation, that the jus quod natura 
omnia animalia docuit was regarded by the later Eoman 
jurists in the light in which no naturalist would regard it 
now, as a law imposed upon things by the will of a meta- 
physical providence, called Nature, exterior to themselves. 
And if the Nature that imposes the law is only the nature 
of the beings subject to it, Ulpian and Montesquieu are at 
one ; and — so far from being self- evidently in the wrong, 
against those who recognise no other source of law than 
external arbitrary will associated with power — they may be 
credited with penetration in advance of their age, for hav- 
ing made their conception of the animal life of men and 
beasts serve as a connecting link between their knowledge 
of the inanimate world and their conception of the purely 
human, rational life of man. 



NATURAL LAW. 



If we regard the laws observed by natural objects as the 
record of their specific nature as manifested under given 
known conditions, it is evident that the presence of the 
conditions is essential both to our knowledge of the law 
and to its actual observance by the thing. All sugar will 
dissolve in tea, but as long as it is dry it does not dissolve : 
the liquid in which it may be immersed does not bestow 
upon it the property of solubility, but if we could suppose 
a lump of sugar to be conscious, it would not unnaturally 
conclude the necessity, under which -it found itself, of dis- 
solving, to be imposed upon it by the first cup of tea in 
which it was placed. The inference is sound, with one 
important qualification, which the sugar is scarcely in a 
position to make. The tea dissolves it on condition of its 
being sugar, and not, for instance, rock-crystal; but to 
effect the result — of dissolution to the sugar and sweeten- 
ing to the tea — it is not enough for the sugar to be sugar, 
unless the tea is tea, and not, for instance, frozen mercury ; 
one of these substances cannot be said to impose upon 
the other the law which regulates their relations, yet the 
existence and nature of each is the sine qua non of a parti- 
cular compulsion exercised upon the other. 

Now, though the consciousness of constraint exercised 
by an external power is a part of the idea of laws properly 
so called, we do not find that their binding force depends 
upon their being set, or laid down as expressions of the 
lawgiver's will, as human or divine "commands." It 
belongs at least as much to the idea of a law that it shall 
be generally obeyed as that it shall be authoritatively 
imposed, and it is misleading to insist on one of these 
elements to the exclusion of the other. 

Supposing that human conduct follows knowable laws, 
or exhibits perceptible constancies of relation, it is still an 
open question whether the necessary constancy is imposed 
from without or from within, or whether it arises, as in the 
case of natural law, from the juxtaposition of certain 
influences and certain susceptibilities. Or, to state the 



NATURAL LAW. 



ii 



problem in another form, it is still an open question, how 
far it is possible to compare the unconscious regularity of 
nature with the conscious uniformities of human conduct 
produced by the presence of permanent motives and vir- 
tually permanent susceptibility to motives. 

The conditions of life are so multiform and human char- 
acter so various that we do not easily discern the laws of 
human life in society. The individual does not survey 
the circumstances of his own and others' life from a 
vantage - ground which might enable him to see the 
method according to which he and they act and forbear 
under the inevitable pressure. The limited experience 
attainable only suffices to make it seem desirable that 
certain classes of action should be regularly performed, 
and others omitted, and to secure this needful measure of 
regularity, the law commands and enforces its commands 
with penalties. But we cannot conclude from this that 
the law, or its organ, is the ultimate source of the actual 
constancy of human conduct in social relations. 

Men are compelled by circumstances to desire a more 
orderly life than they attain spontaneously ; they are beset 
by dangers, moral and physical, against which they spon- 
taneously strive to protect themselves by rule; and it is for 
us to choose whether we shall say that the necessity for 
the rule is imposed by the circumstances which make men 
desire it, or by those qualities of their nature which make 
them desire it under the given circumstances. The new 
element of consciousness gives rise to the idea of the law 
(or objective regularity of things) as addressed to the will, 
which is moved by the real action of external forces in 
favour of uniformity. But, at any given moment, the 
only true lawgiver, in Austin's sense, the only source of 
the compulsion to which the will submits, is to be found 
in the impersonal sum of efficient motives ; though in prac- 
tice we may also look on the rule which men in general, 
on the whole, desire to have enforced, as compelling the 
conduct of the few who wish to break it, either from 



12 



NATURAL LAW. 



native perversity of will or peculiar temptation of circum- 
stances. 

The law, in so far as it is the creation of human will 
and choice, expresses the permanent, average will of the 
generality, but their will is determined by natural condi- 
tions of possibility as well as of inclination. It is the 
formula for the most desirable — or the most desired — 
conduct attainable. Positive law, then, is a command 
binding to actions of a class, necessarily performed, or 
sought to be performed, by the community under actual 
conditions : while natural law is the formula for the classes 
of modifications made necessary to natural objects by 
their own nature and the other fixed conditions of real 
existence. In the case of natural law the compulsion and 
the obedience are of the same involuntary kind ; in the 
case of positive law both compulsion and obedience are of 
the same voluntary, deliberate kind. The debateable land 
of confusion and controversy therefore extends no further 
than the area of questions relating to the normal subjec- 
tion of man, as a voluntary, conscious, responsible agent, 
to the natural forces, which we do not believe to be con- 
scious, voluntary, or responsible agents. 

Much thinking, theological and otherwise, starts with 
the assumption that no such intelligible relation of con- 
straint as belongs to the human feeling of lawful govern- 
ment can subsist between man that wills and the impassive 
tendencies of nature. The most popular explanation of 
the order of the natural world, and man's place therein, 
ascribes the existence and nature of everything that is to 
an act of will on the part of a personal First Cause ; and 
it is supposed that man can only feel bound to obey the 
laws which express a personal will, the will of some con- 
scious subject like himself, — i.e., in practice, man is only 
bound by the laws of nature in so far as they express the 
will of God. 

The adherents of this view would think it little short of 
blasphemous to seek materials for a clear and adequate 



NATURAL LAW. 



13 



conception of how the will of a person can cause anything 
to come into existence out of nothing. We are supposed 
to know by moral and intellectual assurance that God is, 
and the name by which He is acknowledged bears with 
it the association of a great What unknowable by finite 
faculties. And it is no harder to imagine a will creating 
the properties of acts and relations than it is to imagine 
the same will creating real substances. 

The theological faith and feeling in its entirety com- 
mands so much respect and sympathy that we may consider 
ourselves fortunate in not having to take sacred names in 
vain in discussing this conception of law, which postulates 
a personal first cause — outside the law and its subject — of 
the obligatoriness of the law. Hobbes, who regards the 
Sovereign as a miniature Deity, and Austin, who regards 
the Deity as a magnified legislator, both apply to purely 
human relations a similar theory of personal will as the 
source of legal compulsion, and it will be sufficient if we 
can show its inadequacy to explain even the superficial 
uniformities of conduct enforced by the rods and axes of 
political authority. 

Any one can " call spirits from the vasty deep," but to 
constitute an act of sovereignty over the spirits, they must 
be prepared to " come when you do call for them." The 
intention of a ruler, his mere will that such an act be 
done or forborne, does not of itself control, or even mate- 
rially influence, the will of the person to whom the com- 
mand is addressed. The will of another person may be 
accepted as a rule of conduct either from affection, or 
because it is deliberately judged to be wiser and better 
than the subject will, or because it is conceived to possess 
an irresistible strength, the thought of which paralyses, so 
to speak, the power or the will to disobey. But for either 
of these conditions to be fulfilled, it is not enough that the 
legislator be good, wise, or strong, unless the subject is also 
affectionate, reasonably modest, and comparatively weak. 
Austin and his school are therefore driven to the jpetitio 



14 



NATURAL LAW. 



principii involved in defining law as the command of a 
" political superior/' meaning by political superior simply 
some one whose commands are de facto binding. All 
attempts to analyse the origin, source, or nature of political 
superiority are obliged to represent it as relative to the poli- 
tical inferiors on whom the laws are imposed, and whose 
nature is therefore an indispensable condition to the bind- 
ing force of the law. "We can only escape from this circle 
by admitting that two parties are concerned in the mak- 
ing of every law, or rather that law is made when, and 
only when, the wills of the two parties consent and meet 
in one. 

The two essentials of a law are that the relation which 
it formulates should be constant, and that it should 
be the result of constant qualities in the things related. 
Everything that exists is, in a certain sense, a lawgiver, 
imposing fixed and necessary modifications upon every 
other thing which comes in contact with it. The bodily 
life of man is subject to the despotic sway of fixed natural 
conditions, formulated in the laws of nutrition, respiration, 
and general hygiene. But though it is the peculiarity of 
human consciousness to bring, as ifr were, into a focus 
many far-fetched rays of influence, these general facts are 
not felt to control the particular volitions of a man, or 
thought of as addressed to his whole personality. He 
lives his own life as he chooses subject to the natural laws 
of life in general. Pantheists, for instance, do not conceive 
the universe as playing the legislator to its inmates ; and 
one of the many points of variance between theologians 
and naturalists is that the latter do not enter into the 
ideal synthesis of human egotism, which imagines all the 
rays of influence, that meet in the focus of consciousness, 
to have this convergence for their final cause, and to 
spring from some remote invisible centre of will, resolved 
to bring them all to bear at last upon the subject centre 
of consciousness. Men are certainly subject to the law of 
gravitation, but they do not look on weight as one of the 



NATURAL LAW. 



15 



forces by which their lives are ruled; it concerns their 
existence as bodies, not their consciousness as men ; and 
we may add to the definition of the laws of human life 
that the relation formulated must make itself felt by the 
conscious subject as affecting his volitions. 

Law, according to our definition, supposes a personal 
subject of the law, whether it supposes a personal law- 
giver or not ; and it is open to us to investigate the neces- 
sary relations of man to society and the natural world, 
in so far as their nature and his are knowable, without 
prejudice to the metaphysical question, by what right or 
power the relations became necessary, i.e., whether or no 
natural laws are of supernatural imposition. 

In other words, we may have a theory of the subjective 
necessities of man, of the influences which he feels to act 
irresistibly and steadily upon his moral and intellectual 
nature, without personifying the influences, or conceiving 
them to be the expression of a will as personal as his own. 
We may, however, and we naturally do, classify the laws 
to which men are subject, or the permanent conditions 
under which they will, according to the various objects 
whose constant relations to man are stated in the laws. 
Law, morality, and religion, as generally conceived, state 
the constant necessities, or stable modifications of human 
conduct, imposed on man by his various objective rela- 
tions. Law states the compulsion exercised on his will 
by other human wills; morality states the compulsion 
exercised on him by his own nature in relation (mainly) 
to these other wills; and religion deals with the com- 
pulsion exercised on man by the strongest general influ- 
ences of the universe, what Mr. Arnold calls the Not- 
Ourselves. Positive law gives a rule for the overt acts 
of men ; moral law gives a rule for the will, and includes 
the intention as well as the act ; and religion, or the law 
of spiritual liberty, gives a rule for the inclinations, and 
includes the feelings and wishes as well as the will and 
deed. 1 All these laws, without forfeiting their scientific 

1 See Addenda A., page 363. 



i6 



NATURAL LAW. 



character as "a statement of constant relations posited 
by the nature of things," may be variously conceived, 
according as the subject of the law apprehends the rule 
imposed upon and accepted by its will as primarily im- 
posed by its own nature, or by the nature of something 
else ; the necessity really arises from the relation between 
the two natures, but as man is only directly conscious of 
his own side of the relation, he naturally, and not untruly, 
classifies his obligations according to the manner in which 
he is affected by them, and the degree to which he is con- 
scious of the affection. 

If the objective pressure resulting in these uniformities 
is real, natural, and constant, human life is not lawless, 
and the nature and working of the pressure exercised 
upon the human will from all these points will be know- 
able. If there is no such real, natural, and knowable 
pressure, it is time that we cleared our minds from the 
haze of antique prejudice, and enjoyed the melancholy 
satisfaction of knowing universal licentiousness to be the 
natural lot of men. No positive construction is possible 
until we have got rid of the confused ideas and confusing 
phraseology of credulous scepticism and half-hearted faith. 
In any case let us have the courage of our convictions, and 
distrust most of all the formulse which promise to reward 
our quest for truth by stranding us at a secure halting- 
place between two opinions. 



II. 

CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LAW. 

"Dans ces choses, voulez-vous savoir si les desirs de chacun sont legitimes ? 
Examinez les desirs de tous." — Montesquieu. 

"Si l'unite de composition a sa cause primitive dans la limitation des sub- 
stances materielles qui portent la vie, l'unite de plan a sa cause dans les 
predeterminations ou lois qui reglent cette meme vie. Avec des materiaux 
identiques et des lois imperieuses de manifestation, il est impossible 
qu'il n'y ait pas unite* de composition et unite de plan ou de plana." — 
LlTTKE. 



B 



Positive law deals with the constant relations of men to each other follow- 
ing from their nature as men — Query, Have these relations any common 
quality? — Most general natural law that society could not subsist with- 
out law, i.e., if all volitions were incalculably unstable— Customary law = 
the performance by men of the same kind of actions of the same kind, 
similar causes producing similar effects till some of the conditions vary 
— Consciousness of constraint the characteristic of positive law : acts that 
"have to be done" without desire, in obedience to external constraint 
voluntarily submitted to — Custom passes into law when uniform prac- 
tices cease to be instinctive and men become conscious of the generality 
of a usage as a motive for conforming to it, or a deterrent from its 
breach— When customs have become divergent, the will of the com- 
munity expresses itself through a special organ or authorised exponent 
of law — Distinction between legislation and government — Differentiation 
of sovereign and subject — Law requires the co-operation of two natures., 
tendencies, or wills, i.e., at some stage the subject's consent. The effi- 
ciency of sanctions depends on the disposition of the subject towards 
the evil threatened — Natural history of primitive potentates, the patri- 
arch and the chief — Law formulates the real relations inter se of the 
subjects of law — Whence the feeling that natural constancies of relation 
" ought " to be maintained ? — We ask ourselves not only What is jus- 
tice? but also What kind of actions are just?— Justice the best general 
rule practically applicable — Natural selection of possibilities in the direc- 
tion of equity — No standard of right or justice except the real tendency 
of the kind to what it conceives as its good : (the only "natural right" of 
individuals what the common good requires them to have)— Metaphysical 
theories of the source of legal obligation. 



II. 



CUSTOM AR Y AND POSITIVE LA W. 

The passage from the abstract to the concrete is the pons 
asinorum of speculation. We have put forward a theory 
of the nature and force of natural laws which ought to 
correspond to the facts of contemporary observation and 
history. The theory is symmetrical ; remains to be seen 
if it is true. 

To begin at the beginning : Are the fixed rules concern- 
ing the relations of men to each other, observed in real 
communities, such as follow from the nature of men, or 
are they arbitrary inventions ? Is the distinction between 
customary and positive law in any way inconsistent with 
the substantial naturalness of both ? Can we trace the 
evolution of civil and criminal laws, of historical reality, 
from the play of intelligible human qualities in the neces- 
sary relations of civil society ? Can we instance any of 
the constant relations between man and man which follow 
from the nature of men associated in communities ? And, 
finally, granting that the provisions of custom or civil 
law are in the main natural, can we explain the peculiar 
sentiment which, in this case, recognises the natural as 
obligatory, and yet persists in imagining some other test 
or condition of true obligatoriness than the bare fact of 
natural reality ? 

Perhaps the most general statement possible of a rela- 
tion following necessarily from the real nature of man is 
this, that human society cannot subsist without law, not 
necessarily present to consciousness as such, but still 
generally observed. The grounds of this necessity are 



20 



NATURAL LAW. 



easily seen. After the automatic regularity with which 
men, like other animals, provide for the satisfaction of 
their bodily needs and appetites, conscious intelligence 
comes into play. The first condition of rational life is 
the stability of nature ; for the scope of reason lies in the 
adjustment of means to ends, and action with a view to 
ends would be impossible if its calculated effects were 
always liable to be disturbed or frustrated by incalculable 
foreign influences. And what is true of the dealings of 
men with the natural world, applies equally to men in 
social relation with those of their own kind. 

The first condition of society is mutual confidence, and 
unless there is such a thing as human nature, unless, that 
is to say, man possesses certain substantially fixed class 
characteristics, individual men would be unable to shape 
for themselves any course of conduct in which they might 
have to depend on the assistance or neutrality of beings 
acting without law — even if we could suppose it possible 
for lawless impulse to conceive a rational and orderly 
plan. As a fact, of course, we know that man has a 
specific character as clearly marked as that of any other 
organism, animal or vegetable. Certain kinds of action 
are natural to men, and nearly the first use to which they 
put their intelligence is to conceive the ends of such 
actions as their own cause, the motive force or impulse 
that causes them to be done. Granted, then, that men 
act from motives, if their action is in any way regular 
or calculable, this must proceed from persistency in the 
determining conditions, the force of the motives must be 
in the main stable, not varying at random either in the 
same man at different times or amongst different men 
under the same circumstances. 

A natural constancy in the instinctive, customary actions 
of men is a preliminary step towards the resolved con- 
stancy (called law) of their actions in relation to each 
other. Other things being equal, the same actions will 
be natural to the different members of a simple, primitive 



CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LAW. 



21 



community, in which, probably, even diversity of race is 
unknown ; but if the same action is naturally performed 
together by different persons, that circumstance alone 
modifies its nature. Joint action suggests the possibility 
of concerted action, and discourages or discredits isolated 
action. The habit is formed, not only of doing certain 
things, but of seeing every one else do them, and one 
person who does differently jars on the established sense 
of fitness in the rest. Originally, men act together in 
certain ways, led by common sympathies and interests, but 
their union brings fresh necessities with it : established 
social relations, by making life slightly more complicated, 
suggest, while they restrain, fresh personal impulses; the 
nature of an indifferent action is modified by its joint 
performance becoming customary, as that of an indifferent 
omission is modified when it comes to appear as a departure 
from established usage. 

As Sir Henry Maine says : " It is of the very essence of 
custom, and this indeed chiefly explains its strength, that 
men do not clearly distinguish between their actions and 
their duties — what they ought to do is what they always 
have done, and they do it ; " not, however, distinctly " be- 
cause" they always have, but rather for the same reason, 
so long as it continues to apply, that they did before. 
Among savages "ce qui ne se fait pas" includes the 
illegal, the wrong, and the ridiculous, and to this day we 
are not much nearer a reason why we should not do what 
is illegal, wrong, or absurd, than the intuition that we had 
better not. 

Primitive custom, which exists before either law or 
morality, consists in doing what every one else does ; but 
so far as every one readily and naturally does the same 
things, it is not by conscious voluntary submission to an 
external rule, but from a common internal impulse, which 
may be called necessary, since it is effective as well as 
natural. Law does not originate in a conspiracy of the 
community to coerce the individual, any more than in a 



22 



NATURAL LAW. 



conspiracy of the individual to coerce the community ; and 
while the association is wholly voluntary, that is, based on 
common, identical inclination, there is no need for positive 
legislation to enjoin practices which are followed as of course. 
The need for legislation arises when society is so far 
organized as to have an interest of its own, not necessarily 
identical with the momentary inclination of individual 
members of the group, and when this occurs the united 
will of the many may express itself in the form of a com- 
mand binding on the one. The habit, too, of doing thus 
or thus (like everybody else) creates a secondary, subjec- 
tive disposition to go on doing so, which is, in its nature 
conscious, and felt as a restraint upon the natural liberty 
of absolute indifference. Primitive morality, or the idea 
that certain things must be done (those, namely, which 
are done by the tribe or family), is the offspring partly of 
deficient imagination, partly of the fact that the original 
action has become habitual as well as natural, whence a 
secondary, artificial difficulty is felt in substituting any 
other kind of action, till motives of a new class have come 
fully into force. The majority, after feeling the same kind 
of original impulse, experience the same kind of difficulty 
in ceasing to act upon it in particular cases while its 
general force subsists, and the same necessity for ceasing 
if a change in the conditions makes the old act uneasy or 
undesirable. The mere cessation of an old motive does 
not give a feeling of obligation unless a habit formed 
under its influence survives the change of circumstances 
which makes its maintenance useless or inconvenient ; but 
if a present motive for acting in one way comes into colli- 
sion with the formed habit of acting in another, obedience 
to the habit, if it proves the strongest, is attended by a 
consciousness of necessity, legal, moral, or religious, that 
may be quite independent of reason or expediency, as we 
find, in fact, that meaningless ceremonial observances are 
among the first to be associated with the idea of moral 
obligation or duty. And when this first kind of constraint 



CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LA IV. 23 

becomes present to consciousness, all who feel themselves 
hound by it, agree spontaneously in saying, " We " (not yet 
"I") "must do thus and thus:" in other words, custom 
and morality are identified, and made to sanction each 
other's ordinances. 

We are, however, at present less concerned with the foun- 
dations of morality than with the foundations of positive 
law, with duty than with obligation. The history of 
society is the history of relations, between individuals and 
groups, whose conduct and attitude towards each other is 
liable to be modified by the fact that they are conscious of 
the relation, and liable to affections of pleasure and pain 
in connection with that consciousness, which supply new 
motives for the maintenance or modification of the rela- 
tion. The stability of the relations between the various 
members of a community is proportioned to its simplicity. 
These relations, considered objectively, while it occurs to 
no one to modify them, or to conceive them as modifiable, 
form the status of individuals, who are classified naturally 
by their own acquiescence in the position allotted to them 
by circumstances. Early law, as is now generally ad- 
mitted, rests on status, not contract ; it begins by conse- 
crating or affirming that which already is, for facts precede 
reasoning, even from immediate self-interest. 

The explanation of this apparently irrational, impulsive 
origin of the " Social Compact " becomes clear, if we con- 
sider that contract — a deliberate engagement to do or to 
forbear on certain conditions or for certain considerations 
— implies the distinct conception of two independent, 
voluntary actions, and the possibility of performing either, 
neither, or both; conceptions which, it need hardly be 
said, will not be formed until experience, that is, previous 
action, has furnished material for them. The only social 
law which seems to be laid down without appeal by the 
nature of man is the necessity for some law; but the 
addition of new facts, the growth of impulses or appetites 
not absolutely essential to the nature of man as such, 



24 



NATURAL LAW. 



produces new, still stable relations, forming the matter of 
more particular legislation. But relations must be real, 
must exist, before their regularity can be observed and 
accepted as imperative. Law, as the record of facts, is 
posterior to the facts themselves ; which may be illustrated 
by the rather singular suggestion of Comte, that society 
must constitute itself somehow, unscientifically, tant bien 
que mat, before social science can exist — can have a sub- 
ject, a patient, to treat. 

This peculiarity must be allowed to mark a natural dis- 
tinction between the laws of physical science and human 
legislation. Human law proclaims not only a conditioned 
uniformity, but a self-conscious uniformity, and a true law 
might be defined as the passing into consciousness of a 
fixed natural relation or effective tendency. The transi- 
tion from a society based, on status and ruled by unbroken 
custom, to one based on contract and ruled by positive 
law, is that from relations de facto — or of practically un- 
questioned validity — to relations de jure — or of validity 
that is affirmed against questioners ; and it is made by the 
growing consciousness of the relation as binding as well as 
existing. Custom, in becoming conscious, adds a legal 
necessity to itself, but the new necessity is only subjective, 
and adds nothing to the antecedent uniformity. 

Law, properly so called, does not innovate or create, and 
this natural limitation to the power of making quite ran- 
dom experiments in legislation applies as much to a single 
sovereign or lawgiver as to an autonomous community. 
It is at this point that the Naturalistic theory of law (as 
it may be called) diverges from the political or arbitrary 
theory represented by Hobbes and Austin. The dictates of 
custom, as we have seen, may come to be associated with 
feelings of compulsion to all appearance like those which 
secure obedience to laws properly so called, and if a body 
of customary law happens to be written down, or fixed in 
a sacred metrical tradition, its text has a force indistin- 
guishable from that of any imperial code. But it is a fact, 



CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LAW. 



25 



apparently in favour of the other side of the argument, 
that most ancient codes of law profess to have been made, 
or proclaimed by some one mythical sage, king or priest ; 
and though we cannot, on the faith of such traditions, 
altogether accept the personal theory of legislation, we 
may at least admit that law differs from custom in pos- 
sessing, and requiring, always some definite, authorised 
organ. 

The need for an authoritative exposition of the law of 
the land arises at nearly the same stage of social progress 
as the centralisation of political power, and one of the 
earliest functions of government is the administration of 
law. But, as Sir Henry Maine has pointed out, there are 
many absolute political rulers who never legislate, and 
whose edicts, even though enjoining actions of a class, can- 
not be mistaken for laws. Austin held that generality in 
a command was enough to constitute it a law, while we 
should distinguish, even in cases where the sovereign is 
his own legislator, between laws, or the regulation of exist- 
ing relations, and simple precepts or general commands. 
We know as a fact that customary law was in many 
instances full grown before political organisation had 
passed its infancy, while the political organisation of a 
military despot has never resulted in the establishment 
of a system of law where the subject population had no 
fixed civil relations to perpetuate; but the simultaneous 
crystallisation of legal and political authority led not 
unnaturally to the mistake of treating the narrower pheno- 
menon as naturally subsidiary to the wider. Every in- 
dependent community had a government which enforced 
its laws, and as anarchy was a synonym for lawlessness, 
legislation was made a synonym for government. 

In speaking of the rise of law, we are after all general- 
ising from a comparatively small number of historical cases, 
and the illustration that lies nearest us will serve as well 
as any other to show how far the growth of a central 
authority may further the growth of a body of national 



26 



NATURAL LAW. 



law -upon the foundation of popular custom. The outlines 
of the real supply the best boundary against the hypotheti- 
cal, and the parallel development of English Common Law 
and the power of the Crown under our early kings supplies 
more intelligible and authentic grounds for speculation 
than the legends of Deiokes, Lykurgus, or Numa. 

" Consuetudo," says Lord Coke, " is one of the main tri- 
angles of the lawes of England ; those lawes being divided 
into common law, statute law, and custom." The common 
law is — or rather in those days of its departed glory was 
— the general custom of the kingdom, as distinguished 
from that of single cities or manors ; and its authority only 
ceased to be sufficient as well as supreme, as the mass of 
the inhabitants of the kingdom ceased, from a variety of 
causes, to live habitually in such a way that the same 
custom could serve to regulate all their civil and social 
relations ; or, in other words, when social and civil distinc- 
tions and relations became too numerous for all the mem- 
bers of the community to know familiarly and remember 
the rules and precedents according to which their inter- 
course with each other was to be carried on, under all the 
conditions actually liable to arise. 

The chief difference between a custom and a law is that 
the followers of a custom consciously make their actual 
practice the standard of right or obligation, while positive 
law is the utterance of an embodied authority enjoining 
something which the subject does not know or imagine 
that he would have done without the injunction. Law is 
— ideally — the expression of what would be the general 
will if the self-consciousness of the community could be 
suddenly sublimated and intensified, so as to become at 
once aware of all its own strongest impulses, and of the 
adjustments and limitations necessary for reconciling and 
harmonising their indulgence. Only, as the organ by 
which the community expresses this will is itself subject 
to concrete human infirmities — of timidity, self-interest, 
or stupidity — statutes are no more infallible than custom 



CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LAW. 



27 



is omniscient, and to secure a tolerable practical approach 
towards the ideal, the intelligence of the community 
needs to be consciously turned towards the consideration 
of its own real organic needs and wishes, which the 
legislature may otherwise ignore, for want of a suffici- 
ently present sense of their material force. Good customs, 
when they exist, are patent to sense; good laws, when 
they are possible, demand a higher intellectual intuition, 
discerning not merely facts but relations. 

The Norman Conquest helped to precipitate the transi- 
tion from the regime of custom to that of law in England, 
by multiplying class interests and usages. Political inequa- 
lities are one source of social differentiation, and it is the 
development of social differences that causes relations to 
multiply, and — with the multiplication of cross relations — 
the chance of collision between distinct, if not necessarily 
opposing interests. Local or national custom may be strong 
enough to control the erratic or rebellious impulses of indi- 
viduals, but a class having common interests not identical 
with those of the rest of the community may form a custom 
of its own, incompatible with older customary rights and 
privileges. If the appetites or interests of individuals 
come into collision, they either fight out their quarrel or 
compromise it, as it were instinctively; but when the con- 
flict is between the interests or usages of sets of persons, 
instead of individuals, the power of automatic adjustment 
or adaptation breaks down, and the scattered motives to 
mutual concession existing in nature have to be summed 
up and brought home to the consciousness of all alike in 
the official sanction of a law. The growing want of some 
central authority — such as the king and his officers of 
justice — to decide between "bad customs" and those 
that were good, lawful, and binding, contributed as much 
as any directly political cause to the strengthening of 
the royal prerogative that went on under the "English 
Justinian " and his immediate followers and predecessors ; 
the lawful power of the Crown and Legislature increased 



2S 



NATURAL LAW. 



the more because there was no avowable class interests 
concerned in resisting it, while every dawning custom that 
could claim to be innocent or advantageous was eager to 
receive its sanction. 

In the same way, in most historical nations, the making 
of good laws became an important part of government, and 
a necessary step towards the weldiug into one of an arti- 
ficially large and heterogeneous community. But cases 
also abound of sovereigns who have been content with the 
exercise of purely political authority, and have not at- 
tempted to regulate the relations of their subjects among 
themselves. Perhaps it is too much to say that such sove- 
reigns do not legislate at all, since their general commands 
define the duties of the subject to the prince ; at the same 
time, however, it is clear that they do not specify the per- 
manent relations between the two, or the gift of a " consti- 
tution " would not be so long coveted and so reluctantly 
accorded : they decree from time to time what taxes the 
subject shall pay, and what military service he shall 
render, and they may restrict his private liberty to an 
indefinite extent to suit the prince's pleasure or whim. 
These enactments are even less general than our statutes, 
and these, though included under the general head of raws, 
have ever had less sanctity, to the true legal mind, than 
the ancient common law, since one statute may be repealed 
by another, and many are avowedly of only temporary 
Jbrce and interest. 

The distinction, then, is by no means unreal or formal 
between laws that state permanent natural relations and 
develop their logical corollaries, and other enactments of 
political authority. In an absolute government the only 
true law is that which affirms the despotic constitution of 
the state, and this is as far as any other law from being of 
purely arbitrary imposition; it formulates the necessary 
relations between an arbitrary sovereign and a servile 
population, but the law does not make the population 
servile — it must find them so. 



CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LAW. 



29 



The differentiation of a primitive community into tyrants 
and slaves is just as double-sided as any other social de- 
velopment, and the historical steps in the process refuse 
to be summed up in the simple generalisation which 
makes all law and government alike the mere expression 
oi- force majeure, the will of the strongest. The most 
obvious difficulty in the way of supposing law to be made 
by the arbitrary will of individuals, is that no merely 
natural difference between the powers of men living in 
patriarchal or barbarian simplicity is sufficient to enable 
individuals to terrorise, or control, the wills of the com- 
munity; while an artificial or conventional superiority, that 
is to say, one based on wealth, or popularity, or family 
prestige, has to be built up gradually, and with the con- 
sent or assistance of those whose subsequent obedience 
to the power they have helped to found, is assumed by 
the arbitrary theory to be naturally reluctant and only 
extorted by force. 

It will scarcely be maintained that human societies 
subsist without law till such time as they have succeeded 
in educating a tyrant (benevolent or otherwise), and in 
providing him with friends, ministers, and servants in 
such force as to make the mere announcement of his will 
an imposing motive ; and it is in this gradual process, of 
the consolidation of political authority, that we shall find 
the real antecedent of the phenomenon called sovereignty 
— and not in a generic difference between the one and 
the many. The one will be obeyed if his subjects believe 
in his power of compelling obedience, but even so their 
obedience is determined by their opinion about his autho- 
rity, as the real extent of that authority is determined by 
their readiness to acquiesce or not in its exercise. 

Of course at this point the doctrine of sanctions is intro- 
duced. It is not the will or opinion of the subject, we are 
told, but the power of the ruler to inflict punishment, that 
gives the commands of the latter their binding and con- 
straining force. This, however, does not diminish the 



30 



NATURAL LAW. 



original difficulty. A simple expression of will by one 
man to another is a motive, though a slight one, for com- 
pliance, when the act enjoined is either indifferent or 
agreeable; other things being equal, children and adults 
generally do unthinkingly as they are told, either because 
they do not care to disoblige a fellow- creature without 
motive, or because, when personal desires are in equili- 
brium, the slightest touch from without suffices to turn 
the scale ; but if other things are not equal, and com- 
pliance is thoroughly repugnant to the will of the person 
upon whom a command is laid, the effective force of any 
sanction, even capital punishment or eternal damnation, 
depends not on the intrinsic gravity of the threatened 
evil, but upon the disposition of the subject ; his private 
opinion or judgment respecting the comparative disadvan- 
tages of obedience and the consequences of rebellion. If 
the alternative is to fall down and worship the golden 
image which Nebuchadnezzar the king has set up, or to 
be cast into the burning fiery furnace, there is no true 
compulsion, even though the obstinate monotheist should 
not be saved from death by a miracle. An irksome law 
enforced by sanctions will only be generally obeyed if 
the punishment attached to its non-observance is one 
which a majority of the subject population thinks a more 
serious evil than the original evil of obedience; but the 
lawgiver, as such, has no influence upon the opinion to 
which his laws owe their force. To complete the idea of 
command, we must have that of obedience, which, how- 
ever reached or produced, implies consent. 

In point of fact, however, neither law nor government 
depend mainly on the penalties which they proclaim for 
offences ; obedience is the rule, and rebellion the excep- 
tion, or it would cease to be rebellion, and succeed to the 
vacant seat of power. The earliest examples of quasi- 
political authority that we meet with in the domain of 
fact may be reduced to two : the power of the patriarch 
over his household, and the power of the chief over his 



CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LAW. 31 



tribe. This power is sustained in both cases alike by the 
possession of wealth by the political superior; but this 
wealth is not, as in later times, received by the chief or 
father as tribute from his inferiors ; his power is coexten- 
sive with his will and ability to feed dependants ; and at 
the earliest possible moment at which we find social 
inequalities beginning, we find the difference between 
man and man to consist only in slightly greater or less 
power of accumulating wealth, associated with greater or 
less disposition to call the accumulation " mine " — even if 
the only use of it is to be given away. 

The earliest road to possession is, no doubt, by the 
primitive process of " taking," and the power of taking is 
the first to inspire general respect; but it is sometimes 
argued that property has originally to be defended, as well 
as acquired by force, and that, unless he is prepared to do 
so, the early chief, or strong man, will be despoiled of his 
gains by his fellow-tribesmen. There is some confusion 
of the natural order in this view, for the tribe has made 
no step towards political unity, if it does not even 
respect its chief, and, except as a unit, it cannot act 
together, while, by the hypothesis, no single individual 
within it has greater power of " taking " than the chief. It 
is felt to be more profitable to let him take as he can and 
share as he chooses than to scramble once for his takings ; 
and the weakest members of the community have most 
inducement to let the partition of the lion's share be made 
on some other principle than that of a free fight among the 
jackals. 

But in this discussion of possible alternatives, we take 
too little account of the profoundly unimaginative temper 
of primitive man. When he has but lately, by a mental 
effort, raised himself to the conception of a right of pro- 
perty in things extending beyond their momentary use, 
he cannot all at once contradict himself. The invention 
of a possessive case has a meaning or not ; if a horse or 
cow is thought of as " belonging to A," it is ex vi termini 



32 



NATURAL LAW. 



thought of as not available to B for annexation by the 
same natural process as unappropriated goods. The con- 
ception is not easy, and in some of the Pacific islands it is 
only reached by the help of a metaphysical or religious 
artifice; to appropriate a thing, it must be proclaimed 
" taboo " to the rest of the world ; and in Tonga especially, 
the system is said to serve all the purposes of police, 
apparently because the idea "we must not touch this," 
finds easier acceptance than any statement of the reason 
why — namely, that somebody else has claimed or captured 
it first. In any case, we find together with the first exist- 
ence of private property, a spontaneous recognition of its 
existence by others than the owner — at once the condition 
and guarantee of the ownership, as the obedience of the 
subject is the condition and guarantee of the more imma- 
terial possession, political power. 

Taking the possession of wealth — whether measured in 
food, shells, skins, wives, slaves, or other live stock — as 
the first source of social inequality, we have to consider 
how this possession tends to found or strengthen the 
authority, within either the family or the tribe, of the 
owner of the wealth. In the least advanced, polygamous 
societies, where wives are the chief article of property, the 
man who has most wives is also best able to maintain 
those he has, because he has most command of labour, but 
his authority in the tribe is not increased in proportion 
to the increase of his social dignity ; he has still no hold 
upon his fellow-tribesmen or adult sons, except by his 
personal qualities and a larger supply of exchangeable 
daughters. If his wealth takes the form of implements, 
and his stores of food are in excess of his own require- 
ments, a tacit understanding generally exists as to the 
mode in which they are to be got rid of. Wealth is the 
source of dignity, but the proof of wealth is its distribu- 
tion, and the candidate for popularity and honour must 
reduce himself periodically to poverty, by giving feasts 
to his neighbours, with the assurance that his credit 



CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LAW. 



will be lost as soon as he becomes unable to repeat the 
process. 

This primitive exploitation of the strong by the weak 
is sufficiently illustrated by the experience of European 
travellers in Africa. Livingstone in one of his earlier 
journeys expressly complains of the hardship of having, 
after a day's march, to go in search of game, while his 
followers rested, and when he had shot anything, having 
to return to the camp to summon them to bring it home, 
he being ex officio the bread (or rather meat) winner of the 
band. His influence was strictly proportioned to his use- 
fulness, and though, by using all the authority his previous 
usefulness had won, he could, on an emergency, secure 
obedience to his recommendations for a time, unless their 
utility became promptly apparent, a passive mutiny, against 
which there was no remedy, became inevitable. The 
savage chief, like the patriarch, first acquires ascendency 
and then thinks of utilising it for his own advantage ; the 
subject class, on the contrary — consisting of those who, by 
accepting passively a present benefit, begin to contract the 
habit of letting their fate be determined for them by other 
forces than their own will and energy — by the time the 
habit has become fully formed have become ready in their 
turn for exploitation, of which the fruit is longer in coming 
back to their descendants in the shape of a general social 
gain. 

In communities dependent on human labour only, if the 
division of classes is carried further than the simple dis- 
tinction of master and servant, the next source of social 
subordination seems to be afforded by the ascendency of 
one class or profession — practically, of course, that of the 
warrior class — over the rest. In all these societies the 
chief is not a political authority unless there are already 
existing social grades^ of which his authority is not the 
source. The explanation seems to be, that the accumula- 
tion of wealth on a scale to give one person authority over 
the whole community, in virtue of his wealth alone — is im- 

• c 



34 



NATURAL LAW. 



possible without domestic animals ; and that among com- 
munities in which the accumulation of wealth by the royal 
road of pasturage is excluded, difference of skill or employ- 
ment — i.e., caste — is the source of more real and important 
distinctions than inequality of wealth. Political authority, 
of the most tyrannous kind, may exist in such commu- 
nities, but the habit of submission to it is formed gradually, 
at least records of its existence in very different stages of 
its formation may be met with among kindred populations, 
and as all these social processes are substantially rational, 
under the given conditions, we are not likely to be far 
wrong in ascribing ordinary human motives for each tran- 
sition. 

Slaves taken in war supply a servile class, as soon as the 
custom is abandoned of marrying the women, adopting the 
children, and putting the warriors of the vanquished to 
death. Slaves have little to do in the absence of arts and 
industries, but as soon as a choice exists, the slaves will be 
habitually employed, and their children after them, in the 
least honourable and remunerative of needful pursuits. Cer- 
tain skilled arts may become hereditary in free families, but 
war continues to be par excellence the honourable art. In all 
these cases the authority of the chief seems to depend upon 
a more or less strictly hereditary precedence in a dominant 
class or caste. The chief is followed in battle because of 
his ability to lead ; and in time of peace he can command, 
within variable limits, the services of the lower classes, 
who believe in the superior dignity of the pursuit which 
they do not follow. The habit of joint tribal action for 
purposes of common interest is easily extended, and rude 
palaces and other public works are erected at the summons 
of the chief (who thus acquires a nucleus of immoveable 
property) as readily as communal huts and fishing-dams. 
Primitive despotic monarchies, of all sizes and dates, have 
more in common with bodies of this type than with the 
patriarchal family, and in fact we find that the power of 
the chieftain, if it exists at all, develops apart from the 



CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LA W. 35 



organisation of the family, whenever it is impossible for 
one family alone to represent, or collect, enough wealth to 
give political authority over the community at large to its 
chief member. 

The organisation of the patriarchal family, after a pat- 
tern of solid durability fit for imitation on a large scale 
in the state, seems to have begun with the power and will 
of the patriarch to assert the substantially identical nature 
of his dominion over all that was his, wife, children, slaves, 
and domestic animals, as well as chattels, acquired, manu- 
factured, or inherited. The tie was still property rather 
than descent ; if a man owned several wives as slaves, their 
children were his by ownership more certainly than by 
paternity. If he had dwelling around him and under his 
protection, in virtually the same position as his own sons, 
both slaves and clients, or voluntary dependants, the chil- 
dren of these two classes would cease to be distinguished, 
the only exception being made in favour of the eldest son, 
or son of the favourite wife, who would inherit unimpaired 
the whole burden and privilege of paternal power. If the 
patriarch is rich enough to have many children, they make 
him powerful as well, by multiplying his dependants, so 
that poor men from a distance are glad to be received 
amongst them, and render the same services in exchange 
for the same protection. And it is observable that in 
proportion as the utility of these followers increases, the 
responsibility of the head diminishes, for the burden of 
rearing children for his service is thrown upon the actual 
parent, while the gain is reserved for the patriarch who 
nominally represents the community, and really represents 
the fruit of its sacrifices and docility. 

Communities in which families are organised on the 
patriarchal pattern may be subdivided into those consisting 
of fathers who are equal landowners (i.e., where the "village 
system" is developed), and those in which great inequalities 
of wealth are made possible by the possession of cattle, 



36 NATURAL LAW. 

The chief develops into the despot, or military leader and 
king; the father into the aristocrat or free citizen — as 
Plato makes the first laws consist of various sets of family 
custom, harmonised by heads of houses. In all early com- 
munities customary law has the same kind of history, and 
only varies in its matter according to the nature of the 
interests it is chiefly called on to regulate, e.g., the condi- 
tions of land-tenure, of pasturage, or of marketing and 
commerce and mechanical industries. 

But the political circumstances of the community — what 
we may call its international relations — react on the form 
of government, and frequently serve as a motive with the 
subject class, to strengthen the hands of the central autho- 
rity, even though such accession of strength is likely to 
be used against themselves. The dramatic scene between 
the prophet Samuel and the children of Israel asking for a 
king, is true in the spirit if not in the letter, and if a free 
people can be plausibly represented as desiring a king like 
the other nations, a fortiori may the nations where kings 
grew up spontaneously be supposed to obey them, on the 
whole, voluntarily. But when the state has acquired a 
central organ of power, capable of legislating as well as 
governing, the natural limitations on arbitrary law-making 
already referred to, begin to apply. The art of government 
lies in determining which, out of several courses that the 
subject can be induced to take, shall be taken, in matters 
concerning the interests of the state as a whole or the ruler 
as an individual. That of leoislation consists in determin- 

o 

ing which, out of a similar variety of alternative courses, 
shall be habitually adopted ,by the subjects in matters 
mainly concerning their private, non-political interests. 
The sovereign, once installed as such, may govern as he 
pleases, provided he does not command anytking radically 
inconsistent with the true nature of the subject population ; 
and he may legislate as he pleases, subject to the same 
limitation; but as, in practice, more human interests are 



CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LAW. 



37 



concerned in the laws of a civilised country than in its 
government, bad laws betray themselves more easily than 
bad government, and as the selfish gain of the prince is 
less direct, the administration of law is more often neglected 
than perverted under evil rulers. The bad laws which a 
bad sovereign might wish to make, in nine cases out of ten 
would simply fall wide of the national practice and have 
no effect at all, and it is to this fact, rather than to the 
essential wisdom of sovereigns by the divine right of estab- 
lishment, that the substantial disinterestedness of all con- 
siderable systems of law is owing. The few exceptional 
cases in which a well-meaning ruler attempts to introduce 
positive reforms by way of legislation, rather confirm than 
invalidate the rule of the natural separation between the 
functions of law and government, for the success of such 
attempts has always been conditional on the presence of 
real progressive tendencies among the people, only needing 
to be developed and directed. 

Every digression into the precincts of history confirms 
our original thesis, that laws cannot be made by arbitrary 
will without reference to the subjects' nature ; and we must 
add to the definition of a law, besides generality in the 
command, that the command be one which, in the nature 
of things, can and will be generally obeyed. The substance 
or provisions of any law are therefore necessarily limited 
by the nature of the subject, the real relations of which — ■ 
natural, social, moral, or political — it is in fact the function 
of law to enumerate. Law may state the necessary rela- 
tions of sovereign and subject, posited by the nature of 
both, when they have differentiated themselves ; or it may 
describe the normal relations of men in their various other 
characters, as equal citizens, as proprietors, acquiring, 
using, and inheriting wealth, as master and servant, hus- 
band and wife, or as entering together into free contracts 
not extending to the general status. 

But the question whether, in the dealings of men with 



3S 



NATURAL LAW. 



each other, there are any perceivable constancies of rela- 
tion which can be traced to permanent qualities of their 
nature, even supposing it to be answered in the affirmative, 
still leaves half of the problem untouched ; for we have 
further to account for the fact that the mere statement of 
these constant relations (supposing them to exist and to be 
formulated in positive law) acquires a kind of sacredness, 
a binding force, so that men do not see in law the record of 
what is done, but variously, a statement of what ought to 
be done, and a precept as to what must be done. The mere 
existence of such constancies of relation is not a reason, 
much less a motive constraining the will to submit to the 
restrictions they impose ; yet in positive law we see, as it 
were, the constancy reflected upon, and its maintenance 
resolved : and we distinctly do not find that this feeling 
depends upon associations of pain or disgrace consequent 
on breach of the law, since it is only when the law cor- 
responds to the set of popular will and feeling that its 
breach can be permanently so visited. 

It is true of law, as Adam Smith says of morality, that 
it teaches men to try particular actions by general rules 
expressive of their permanent disposition with regard to 
acts ; but he does not explain why people think they 
ought to feel merely what they usually do. No doubt they 
verify their sentiments by an unconscious reference to the 
natural sentiments of an ideal " impartial spectator " or 
their own unimpassioned judgment ; but the fact that a 
precept is of general application does not seem by itself to 
add in any metaphysical way to its inherent force or obli- 
gatoriness. The dictates of positive morality or custom 
are felt to have the force of law whenever the moral or 
customary motive is recognised as properly dominant as a 
rule. To obey a law is to act in accordance with it, and 
" actions of a class " are not performed without some con- 
stant cause or motive. The vera causa of regularity in the 
action is regularity in the motive, and the regularity with 



CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LA W. 39 



which men seek to reduce their actions to rule has its 
cause in the constant pressure of an orderly system of 
things in favour of systematic adjustment, concert, and 
co-operation amongst persons. 

The cause or reason why human societies are governed 
by law is, that beings of the same kind in the same cir- 
cumstances act in substantially the same way ; this is true 
of gases, earths, and vegetables, and the conduct of men 
may be expected, in the same way, to have ascertainable 
common qualities or tendencies, all the more so from its 
being rational, that is to say, deliberately planned with a 
view to attaining the end of the spontaneous tendency. 
Natural causes might thus explain the origin of law and 
social order, but the secondary, self-conscious desire for the 
observance of law and the maintenance of order finds its 
motive or explanation neither directly in nature nor in 
reason, but in the special feeling of subjection to a con- 
stant pressure of motive in certain fixed directions ; the 
motive is not only felt, but it is felt as always there, lay- 
ing its injunctions on the will, and acquiescence in its 
power grows into a habit. Volitions are regular because — 
and in so far as — the constant conditions under which men 
will are regular ; but consciousness of voluntary regularity 
is virtual obedience to law, and the conscious love of regu- 
larity implies a kind of piety or loyalty towards the con- 
ditions which secure it, so that in practice respect for law 
always means respect for the laws that are. 

The readiness of society to put all its available resources 
at the service of the law, to enforce or sanction its obser- 
vance, springs from more obvious grounds of self-interest, 
and is connected with the natural impulse of men towards 
rational action, i.e., action in pursuit of ends, which implies 
the adjustment of means to anticipated effects, or, in other 
words, calculation. Eegulated volitions can be calculated 
upon, and therefore, by an elementary necessity, the indi- 
vidual will desires for itself, and all kindred wills, the re- 



NATURAL LAW. 



cognition and acceptance of whatever fixed conditions are 
necessary for the free indulgence of its impulses. 

This conclusion coincides substantially with Kant's con- 
ception of jus, or law in general, as the sum of conditions 
under which a general law of freedom can harmonise the 
arbitrary will of one man with the arbitrary will of all, or, 
in other words, a statement of the conditions under which 
social life, as men actually desire to lead it, is possible. 
Law, or jus, or the existence of binding rules of conduct, 
depends then upon the fact that human life is " condi- 
tioned," and this is so truly natural a necessity that men 
are not conscious of a legal or moral obligation to have 
laws ; on the contrary, the necessity is often spoken of as 
a sign of depravity : " Law is not made for the righteous 
man, but for the lawless and disobedient ; " or, in the words 
of a writer of the last century, " Society is made by our 
needs, and government by our wickedness." The positive 
laws, which men do feel bound to obey, state the particular 
necessities imposed by social life, not — what they could by 
no means enforce — the duty of association in general, or 
the necessity for a law-abiding habit of mind. Similarly 
we cannot deduce the various moral obligations of men 
from a general law in favour of the existence of duties, or 
their religious emotions from the abstract desirableness of 
having feelings towards the Not-self. We can only enu- 
merate the obligations actually felt, classify them according 
to their apparent source, and then, by a counter-synthesis, 
bring out the common quality of all the different kinds of 
obligation owned by the human will. 

The question, winch naturally comes into existence first, 
law or morality, is happily not of much importance, since 
it is certain that both exist, either together or separately, 
before the distinction between them is reflected upon. A 
vague sense of obligation is felt and acted upon before the 
source or the authority of the constraining power is even 
analysed, much less disputed; but the fact that human 



CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LA W. 41 



laws can be disputed, or, as we say, disobeyed, seems to 
point to a real difference in kind between them and the 
few true scientific laws which we conceive to be altogether 
infallible and inevitable. To know the nature of an inani- 
mate object is to know all the " classes of actions " which 
things of the kind certainly perform under all discoverable 
conditions. To say, therefore, that man can disobey the 
laws of his own nature is to deny that he has a nature; not 
merely to doubt the possibility of discovering constancies 
of relation among his multifarious powers and appetites, 
but to deny that such constancies are real. Marcus Au- 
relius says, " Only to the rational animal is it given to 
follow voluntarily what happens, but simply to follow is a 
necessity imposed on all." Is it, on the contrary, given to 
the rational animal alone voluntarily not to follow what 
happens ? 

Stated in this way, the question answers itself; there 
must be some ambiguity about any use of the word law 
that can lead logically to the supposition that the only 
being that ever acts consciously by rule is the only being 
naturally incapable of acting by fixed and certain rules. 
The ambiguity would perhaps disappear if we could import 
into science the lawyer's distinction between the law and 
the facts of a case, or at least what one legal authority dis- 
tinguishes as the rational and the historical element in law. 
Men must stand in some constant relations to each other, 
but what the relations shall be is not a matter for reason 
or law, but of fact and observation ; only, when certain 
relations are an established fact, other secondary, derivative 
laws, or statements of relation, are necessarily limited to 
consistency with the broad first principles already laid 
down. 

All positive law has the same practical authority, as in 
the natural world all occurrences are in one sense equally 
necessary ; but there is a difference between the necessity 
of a rule established by an historical exercise of the legis- 
lative will and one reached by deduction from conclusions 



4^ 



NATURAL LAW. 



previously admitted; the latter necessity is logical, and 
the only one that gives universal juridical truths, or laws 
that satisfy Bentham's requirement of executing them- 
selves, and cannot be disobeyed. The laws of nature are 
only the records of natural facts, but it does not conduce 
to clearness or accuracy of thinking to call every unifor- 
mity in nature a law, because the real uniformities ob- 
served in nature are distinguished, or distinguishable, in 
thought, according to what we find to be the cause, or 
constant conditions, of their occurrence. Such distinctions, 
no doubt, are mental, and have more to do with the sub- 
ject than the object of knowledge; they may even be 
treated as empty and metaphysical, yet they have their 
importance in thought. The material cause of any natural 
uniformity is the cause or set of conditions, whatever they 
may have been, of the facts in which the uniformity is 
observed, but it is frequently possible for a rational ex- 
planation to connect this or that particular relation of 
uniformity with other sets of constant relations, and when 
this is so, it may be convenient to call it a law ; but a 
simple statement of facts, standing by themselves and 
throwing no light upon any other class of facts, fails in the 
chief purpose of a law, which is the subsumption of fresh 
cases as they arise, it is at best a private bill, or the by- 
law of some natural vestry. 

That these considerations are not altogether foreign to 
the matter of " laws properly so called" appears both from 
Bacon's weighty aphorism, " Ratio yprolifica, consuetudo 
sterilis est nec generat casus" and from the magnificent 
maxim which meets us in every highly- developed system of 
jurisprudence : "What is not reason, is not law ;" from which 
it would appear that the only laws which man must be con- 
ceived incapable of breaking, in order to vindicate his right 
to be considered as a possible object of scientific knowledge, 
are those laws which are intrinsically reasonable, or those, 
the precepts of which follow, by the logic of facts, from 
the most elementary axioms and postulates of social life. 



CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LAW. 



43 



As man is generally defined as a rational animal, this con- 
clusion seems to bring us hopefully near to the necessary 
certitude of identical propositions, but we have still to dis- 
tinguish between the law and the fact. There are a few 
very simple general laws to which we know, of no excep- 
tions ; all matter gravitates, and all human societies obey 
some law, but when we come to classes of bodies of at all 
a composite character, the law which is found to hold good 
of the class, and of every individual belonging to the class 
in so far as it is a normal specimen of its kind or species, 
does not of itself furnish us with any security that any or 
every specimen shall be normal. Eational law cannot 
pretend to do more than state the rules of conduct nor- 
mally followed by the normal or rational man. 1 

The normal citizen obeys the laws of his country, be- 
cause these laws on the whole represent the permanent will 
of himself and his contemporaries concerning the condi- 
tions of relationship amongst themselves. In ninety-nine 
cases out of a hundred it is the spontaneous wish of every 
civilised man that property should change hands by con- 
sent and not by compulsion without equivalent, i.e., that 
trade should be allowed and theft forbidden, that no one 
should die except from disease, accident, or judicial sen- 
tence, that the customary constitution of the family should 
be sustained, and so forth ; and in matters of more detail, 
the average citizen willingly commits himself to the guid- 
ance of specialists, whose trade it is to apply the general 
principles of law spontaneously agreed upon to the innu- 
merable cases, hardly any exactly alike, which arise from 
time to time. It might seem, no doubt, absurd to say that 
any special law of inheritance follows by physical neces- 
sity from the nature of man as such ; but given one or two 
leading principles, such as the equal inheritance of all 
children, as at Eome, inheritance of the oldest male in the 
direct line, as in feudal law, or primogeniture without dis- 
tinction of sex, as in the Basque country, a number of 
other regulations follow naturally from the application of 

1 See Addenda B., page 364. 



NATURAL LAW. 



the rule under the actual conditions of relationship and the 
chances of life. A child can understand the first principle, 
as a child can understand the axioms of the first book of 
Euclid, but it takes a lawyer or a mathematician to de- 
velop all the logical consequences which follow in our 
world from such premises. 

Systems of positive law, as has been said, enumerate the 
necessities imposed on men by each other's wills, and a 
philosophy of law, in the narrower sense, deals with the 
question — Have these necessities any common quality, and 
how is it to be recognised ? — as ethical philosophy deals 
with the common quality (if any) of moral precepts, and 
the philosophy of religion with the common element (if 
any) in the various manifestations of devout feeling. 

Hitherto we have only found two unmistakable signs 
of a true law, generality, and what, if the barbarism may 
be excused, we should call obeyableness. But this latter 
quality throws as little light as the alternative note of 
authoritativeness on the nature or substance of natural 
human law — the natural characteristics of the normal 
working of social relations. A law must be obeyed as 
well as imposed, but what are the conditions of obedience ? 
The habitual will of every one — including myself — gives 
laws to the community ; and the habitual will of the rest 
of the community, gives laws to me ; the reason that I 
and they nevertheless obey the same laws is that we have 
all, most commonly, motives for doing (or forbearing) what 
we have motives, most commonly, for wishing others to 
do or forbear ; and law only becomes burdensome in the 
exceptional cases when the individual will wishes to break 
out of bounds and emancipate itself from the normal suc- 
cession of cause and effect, by taking to itself some uncon- 
ditioned good. The true lawgiver is the sum of effective 
motives, but the character of the accepted law depends on 
the sum of present susceptibilities to motive. Looking 
upon every will as at once active and passive, ruling and 
obeying, we want to know what are the classes of actions 



CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LAW. 



45 



that it will agree, in both capacities, in calling lawful and 
necessary for men ? 

The morality of laws is often alleged as the condition of 
their true and permanent force, but this view cannot be 
accepted without question while a rival school holds that 
the precepts of morality themselves are only binding as 
expressions of an omnipotent lawgiver's will. The qua- 
lity we know as justice may be by nature equally charac- 
teristic of the objective rules of conduct called law and 
the subjective rules of conduct called morality; and the 
explanation of this fact, if a satisfactory one could be 
found, would show us the common element essential to all 
conscious constancies of relation in the intellectual life of 
man. But if the development of real relations necessarily 
precedes the discovery of a correct theory or formula for 
the relation, law must have exhibited a spontaneous 
tendency towards justice, before justice could have been 
accepted as the natural standard of the ideal in law. 

Substances of the same kind, acting under similar cir- 
cumstances according to the same laws, do not habitually 
produce entirely heterogeneous results, and we may there- 
fore expect to find a degree of family likeness amongst the 
simple acts and forbearances habitually prescribed by law 
or opinion as just. But definitions of the point of resem- 
blance are themselves so many and various that it may 
well seem hopeless to give a satisfactory account of it. 
The easiest theory, that those things are just and lawful 
which are actually enjoined by law, even if it were other- 
wise adequate, would still be open to the objection that it 
only shifts the point of uncertainty, for we should still ask, 
what kinds of acts are generally enjoined by law? To 
define the just by the useful is to substitute two uncer- 
tainties for one, unless it is explained to whom the just act 
is useful, and even then the further question, what is use ? 
would be found as difficult as the one for which it is sub- 
stituted. Theories in which the conception of moral right 
is blended with and colours that of natural justice are 



4-6 



NATURAL LAW. 



more properly considered under the head of morality than 
that of law, and a perfectly self-supporting metaphysical 
theory of the foundations of natural justice has scarcely 
yet been invented. 

The idea of justice, according to the ordinary English 
use of the terms, is more abstract than that of law, so 
that it is convenient to borrow the word jus for the some- 
what intermediate conception, reached in the same way as 
other abstract ideas, of the common quality possessed by 
some actions of " having to be done," without desire, in 
obedience to external constraint, voluntarily submitted to. 
Having seen how this idea in its most general acceptation 
might and probably did arise, we have to inquire into the 
steps by which, historically, the notion oijusta, things just, 
rather than lawful, or things according to law as it ought 
to be, whether it was so or not, detached itself from the 
simpler, more positive experience of ages in which fact 
was law, not merely, as we endeavour to show is still the 
case, by a hidden philosophical necessity, but plainly and 
notoriously. In other words, we want to know what are 
the general characteristics of the relations of men in their 
conduct to each other, which are made necessary (or real) 
by their nature as men : — not, What is justice ? but, What 
kind of actions are just ? 

The proof of law is the fact of its observance, and the 
philosophy of " precedents " is simply the assumption that 
whatever has been habitually done heretofore was done for 
good reason, and will therefore continue to be done until 
cause positive be shown for its omission, when, such cause 
not having existed in the preceding case, the precedent 
ceases to be binding. Early laws are rather declaratory of 
existing usage than imperative as to future practice, and 
there is much to be said in behalf of the probable reason- 
ableness of this kind of customary law; for, in the absence 
of disturbing forces — of religious or aristocratic prejudice, 
of an overbearing particular interest, or a petrifaction of 
the judicial faculty — it may plausibly be concluded that 



CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LA IV. 47 

only those customs will permanently prevail amongst a 
people which that people freely chooses to observe, that is, 
such as the common interest and inclination approves; 
and if the function of reason in practical life is to show 
how all possible satisfaction may be given to all real 
desires, evidently the most reasonable laws will be those 
which state the formula that includes all the recorded 
cases, or gives the soundest generalisation of real practice. 

But in primitive states of society cases are rare, and the 
declaration of the law has to be postponed until it has 
been empirically made, in all cases that cannot be refeired 
to an intelligible standard of natural absolute right or 
reason. We need not stop to inquire whether such a 
standard is ever applicable; but when points that are 
naturally indifferent require to be fixed by law before 
there is a real consensus of usage respecting them, even 
acute lawyers in historical times are reduced to strange 
perplexity in seeking for the law which does not yet exist. 
Custom itself is not felt as binding until the consensus 
which established it is beginning to give way, upon which 
it becomes law or obsolete. But when a real tendency 
towards customary usage is struggling into objective exist- 
ence, a community that has already formed, from experi- 
ence, the idea of jus in general, hastens to conclude that 
there must be latent somewhere, either in the clouds or in 
the wisdom of their ancestors, or in the eternal nature of 
things, a law applicable to the present exigency, if only 
they knew what it was. 

In nearly all the countries of Europe the law of succes- 
sion to the throne passed through such a phase ; it was 
really uncertain — not habitually violated — during all the 
time that usage was as various as the supply of possible 
pretenders ; and the acquisition of general proprietary 
rights, by inheritance or contract, has usually been regu- 
lated in the same gradual, tentative way by the consecra- 
tion as legal of the power proved to be strongest in the 
greatest number of leading cases. The general principle, 



4 3 



NATURAL LAW, 



hardly perhaps precise enough to be called a law, accord- 
ing to which all such vexed questions tended finally to 
decide themselves, was the desirability in human affairs of 
leaving as little as possible to the disposal of arbitrary 
accident. The aim of all civilised legislation is to mini- 
mise (by distribution or otherwise) the action of chance, 
and to make it more and more difficult for the merely 
natural accidents of life to carry with them serious modifi- 
cations of legal and social status. And side by side with 
this tendency, a kind of natural selection among quasi- 
prescriptive rights goes on, till the claims which can 
oftenest point to prescription in their favour come to be 
systematically recognised as legal, and the description of 
such claims serves to supply a rule to which others as they 
arise are referred. 

It is a familiar historical fact that " case " usually pre- 
cedes "statute" law, or, what comes to the same thing, 
that the office of judge is more ancient than that of legis- 
lator. " Law " is supposed to be there, and is, of course, 
in its nature certain, but doubt as to what is law cannot 
always be guarded against. The first step towards a 
settled state of society is to proclaim the sacredness of 
what is, and this is done by the legislator as richtend, not 
as gesetzgebend, as judging, not as ruling. The division 
corresponds roughly to the distinction met with almost 
everywhere between written and unwritten law, the latter 
of which is naturally preferred until cases become over- 
whelmingly numerous, just as written laws are allowed to 
remain undigested till the extreme limits of legal libraries 
and memories have been reached. Unwritten law has the 
advantage of a reasonable elasticity, for until lawyers and 
others begin to theorise about the beauty and fixity of the 
law, it is always as far from fixed as daily convenience 
may require. The last truth that men are willing to 
recognise in theory is the instability of their own tastes, 
habits, and even principles; but in practice, when their 
natural forgetfulness is not interfered with by statute or 



CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LAW. 



record, they have no scruple about allowing that what was 
law once may cease to be so, and that be law now which 
of old was not — a maxim of course to be admitted and 
applied with judicial caution. But the power given to 
judges of deciding in the same sentence what rules are 
actually in force, as well as to which of these rules a parti- 
cular case must be referred, is so discretionary as to be 
only tolerable while the judge acts really as mouthpiece 
to the common mind, and when the mind of society comes 
to be divided, by class prejudices or class interests, judge- 
made law cannot be expected to give universal, or even 
general satisfaction. 

The primitive judge was a personage of great import- 
ance, because the task of formulating the just and accept- 
able generalisations concerning the custom to be followed 
by the community required a combination of rare intel- 
lectual and moral force. Law is virtually made by the 
causes that lead to its being obeyed as soon as it has been 
promulgated, but it is not known, and therefore not obeyed 
as law until it is promulgated, and accordingly the autho- 
rised legislative power, whatever it be, which declares the 
law, is, as we have seen, credited with the supposed higher 
function of making or laying it down. In primitive com- 
munities, judgments and laws possess the like semi-sacred 
authority, and the question whether customary law is wise 
or equitable does not arise as long as it is really customary, 
i.e., as long as its binding force is undisputed. It might 
even be said, as one of the many paradoxes with which 
the subject abounds, that the idea of justice, as a quality 
that ought to be possessed by judgments, is not formed 
until judgments become uncertain or of disputable jus- 
tice, and cease to be necessarily satisfactory and bind- 
ing. It is scarcely possible to think of a just judgment 
except by comparison or contrast with judgments that are 
not just, and as such criticism as this presupposes some 
other standard of justice than what lies in the breast of the 
sovereign judge, whenever it becomes articulate, we may 

D 



NATURAL LAW. 



expect to find general rules or laws ready thenceforward to 
supersede the discretionary resolution of cases. Somewhat 
as the primitive ruler is able to give wise judgments before 
he or his people feel the need of laws, the people intuitively 
estimate the wisdom of his sentences before they have 
reached the point of distinguishing any kind of general 
rule as necessary, and a fortiori before they can distin- 
guish general rules into those that are essentially obey- 
able and those which are not so. In point of fact, the 
just judgment was the one which corresponded to the 
existing social opinion, and gave effect to the latent 
will of the community concerning the righting of wrongs 
as they arose. Criminal law, which develops before 
civil law, generalises these judgments upon anticipated 
offences, and the formula for avoiding offence, given at 
the same time, contains the rudiments of positive law. 
But we are nearer having a direct intuition of the just, or 
what constitutes an acceptable judgment in particular 
cases, than of the naturally lawful, or what constitutes 
an obey able rule for all known or imaginable cases. The 
just may turn out to be, in judgments and laws alike, 
nothing more than the naturally selected practical Best, 
but its identity is more easily recognised in the concrete 
form, and for the same reasons, its nature is more easily 
detected and its qualities described. It is easier to com- 
pare things than conceptions, and acts or forbearances than 
the relations of acts, and our only hope of solving such a 
problem as What constitutes the practical Best in human 
relations ? must lie in reducing it to its simplest terms. 

The most recent independent attempt to approach the. 
subject from a positive standing-point is that of M. Littre, 
which should perhaps be welcomed as a step in the right 
direction. According to him, justice is to give to every 
one that which belongs to him, what that is having to 
be ascertained by the help of the axiom A = A. The ap- 
plication of this principle, or rather the practical discovery 
that moral equivalents exist, is no doubt a real step in the 



CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LA IV. 51 



evolution of a sense of justice, the Pythagorean doctrine on 
the subject being, perhaps, its earliest expression. It only 
misses the root of the difficulty because it presupposes the 
man who is to be dealt justly with to be already possessed 
of something which — or an equivalent whereof— justice is 
to secure him in the use of for the future ; but it does no 
more than the familiar suum cuique tribuere to account for 
the justice of the original possession. 

On this point Kant is more nearly satisfactory, and if 
we take leave to omit a good deal of scholastic a-prioritdt, 
his view states, if it does not explain, the facts of the case 
fairly and clearly. In this system that which belongs to 
a person is that which he normally has, i.e., what the 
general rules of conduct followed in the society of which 
he is a member, allow such members to acquire or to keep. 
The rules themselves are only generalised statements of the 
common practice, so that in proclaiming the general sacred- 
ness of what is, law really only affirms its own existence : 
it declares what is to be in the main conformable to law. 

At this rate it would seem that we cannot, without argu- 
ing in a circle, regard justice as an intrinsic quality of 
acts : yet our feeling rebels against the inference that if we 
were all habitually to act unjustly, acts which we now call 
just would change their character and become worse than 
blunders, crimes, or violation of the natural law. We dis- 
tinguish instinctively between various kinds of real ten- 
dencies and relations, and call some of the things which are 
"just," and others evil or indifferent; what we feel most 
set upon doing is what we think best to have done, and 
we have no ideal standard underived from reality ; yet we 
cannot say that the tastes and judgments of men are gene- 
rically superior, in the matter of reasonableness and per- 
sistence, to their actions, since our thoughts and feelings 
seem to be for the most part developments of sensibilitjr 
consequent on prior developments of energy. Our idea 
of justice is not coextensive with either the real or the 
good ; it is a name for our estimate of acts as they affect 



52 



NATURAL LAW. 



men among themselves ; and this estimate, we find upon 
analysis, depends npon the measure of permanent reality 
and goodness in the tendencies exemplified. The sentiment 
in our minds which makes the just a name to conjure 
with, is quite distinct from the objective qualities of the 
acts which have come to inspire the feeling, and we must 
not expect to find any metaphysical counterpart to it in 
them. We do not consider certain lines of conduct just 
becaitse they represent the practical Best ; certain aspects 
of the practical Best are distinguished as just, because they 
are distinct, to the mind and feeling, from other aspects ; 
and it is not necessary to import any sentiment at all into 
the question of what we naturally and reasonably judge 
to be the practical Best — for men in their mutual rela- 
tions. 

It is not exactly true that (as Bentham said) society is 
held together " only by the sacrifices that men can be in- 
duced to make of the gratifications they demand : " at 
worst it would be held together by the purpose, whatever 
that was, for which the sacrifices were made. But it is pro- 
bable that, at a comparatively early date, men, who usually 
act first from impulse and then try to attach a meaning to 
their action, began to look for a rationalistic explanation of 
the social compact into which they had been led by an un- 
conscious, disinterested gregariousness. As desires multi- 
plied with the advance of society, it became easy to find 
such an explanation in the help which men could give each 
other in gratifying their desires ; but when the additional 
power which resulted from co-operation began to seek 
fresh objects for itself, society had, so to speak, outgrown its 
members. Instead of a simple consensus of inclination, the 
same in every part, a complex whole, with which indivi- 
duals could scarcely sympathise, and which they soon gave 
up the attempt to understand, was built up by a number 
of heterogeneous impulses, standing in no obvious natural 
relations to each other, and always liable to come dis- 
astrously into collision until the deliberate reason of the 



CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LAW. 



53 



community succeeds in overtaking and controlling the 
wills of its members. 

Pending such a development of practical philosophy as 
would make laws unnecessary, it is their function to deter- 
mine the point at which the action of various natural im- 
pulses must be restricted or arrested so as to allow pro- 
portionate scope to opposing or incompatible impulses. 
In this way it is that early law comes to be chiefly penal 
or repressive, and in reference to penal justice, M. Littre 
is no doubt right in thinking that the discovery of the 
equivalence of equals was important. As he says, 1 it was 
an intellectual rather than a moral advance to contemplate 
the two forms of delayed defence, retribution and compen- 
sat?on, as alternative possibilities ; but the idea of com- 
pensation, when it had once been reached, admitted of 
various moral developments, while retribution was in its 
nature as barren as revenge, of which indeed it is only a 
generalisation. Those classes of acts are naturally re- 
garded as criminal which society in general wishes not to 
have committed, but for the community in general to 
sympathise so far with the anger of an injured person as 
to interfere to punish the offenders when the injury is 
irreparable, shows (like the practice of war) that the 
destructive passions are the first to become altruistic. 

It is a description rather than a definition of primitive 
judicial sentences to say that they consisted in giving 
every man the equivalent of his deserts, and the descrip- 
tion does not explain how, side by side with the earliest 
conception of jus (or the restraints imposed on human 
action by human authority), there grew up the further 
classification of restraints, not as actual and possible, 
desirable or mischievous, but as just and unjust. If law is 
only the general rehearsal and enforcement of usage, what 
is there in the bare fact of actual use to make it the stan- 
dard of anything so sacred as justice ? In the face of the 
common and flagrant separation between the right and the 

1 La Science au point de vue philosophique. 



54 



NATURAL LAW. 



fact in human societies, how can it be maintained that 
there is no higher or other rule of right than a general 
practice much open to exceptions ? 

According to Grotius (who, it is to he feared, is even 
more metaphysical than Montesquieu), voluntary obliga- 
tion, or natural law, is the mother of civil law, and the 
child of nature ; and if we are referred to nature, as the 
last court of appeal, how is nature to pass sentence upon 
herself ? Consciously or otherwise, we do in fact judge 
everything in terms of itself, and the significance of the 
judgment is simply owing to the lack of absolute unifor- 
mity, the more or less of typical completeness which 
characterises real existences of every kind. If men were 
perfect, law and justice would not so much coincide as 
disappear together across the threshold of consciousness ; 
the name might be kept to denote the automatic harmony 
of social actions, but there would be no corresponding im- 
pression in the mind. Opposition or strife is the condi- 
tion of phenomenal "as harmony is the condition of real 
existence. We know things by what they are not rather 
than by what they are, and by what they are chiefly in 
contrast to the things that are not they. Nevertheless, 
things must be, somehow or other, if they are to make 
themselves the object of thought ; and when they are, our 
only knowledge of what they are, or what they normally 
tend to be, is derived from themselves. 

In pronouncing anything to be just or unjust, society or 
an individual simply assumes the office of the primitive 
judge, and classifies a case not provided for (or provided 
for inadequately) by positive law, in accordance with prin- 
ciples embodying the general practice of the time or place. 
An appeal to the inconceivableness of the contrary opinion 
is always an unsatisfactory form of argument, but consider- 
ing the difficulty of an historical treatment of processes 
that; are half completed before the dawn of history, it may 
per] laps be allowable to re-enforce this view by the sugges- 
tion that it would be a very singular kind of society in- 



CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LAW. 



55 



deed in which the normal practice of every individual were 
something entirely different from what was currently 
believed to be good and desirable. Of course there are 
pessimists who will say that England in the nineteenth 
century satisfies the definition of such a society on all 
points • but, on the one hand, the merely formal beliefs 
which do not influence the conduct only inspire lip-judg- 
ments, not real opinions concerning things just and unjust ; 
and on the other hand, the lively belief of the pessimist 
himself much requires to be accounted for, since, in saying 
that the world is bad, we seem to take for granted that 
there are, or have been, or might have been, worlds that 
were good ; only as we have never visited any other world 
than this, it is difficult to see whence, except from this 
one (granted by an exceedingly eclectic process), we can 
have derived the idea of goodness as a quality of worlds. 

In order that law, or natural justice, should be able to 
consist substantially in maintaining the status quo, the 
forces by which society organised itself must not have 
been in the first instance mutually destructive or antago- 
nistic, otherwise society would be consecrating its own 
lingering suicide ; but things do not come into existence 
by committing suicide, and human societies do exist, and 
what they aim at consecrating under the conception of 
law and justice are exactly those tendencies and accom- 
plished facts which make the life, such as it is, of the 
society. Everything which contributes to make the 
society what it is, and what it is content to be, is just in 
the eyes of that society ; and nothing can be permanently 
regarded as just which does not on the whole contribute 
to the lasting good of the community as that is under- 
stood by its members. 

The natural right which is most generally recognised at 
the present day is that of every one to do as he pleases, so 
long as no one else is injured by his pleasure, and it is 
evident, from what has been said, without attaching any 
metaphysical sanctity to the independence of individuals, 



S 6 



NATURAL LAW. 



that the interest, or rather the existence of society, is 
more intimately concerned in the maintenance of this 
than of any other right or faculty. The majority of human 
impulses are not anti-social, or society would never con- 
stitute itself at all, and for its complete organisation so 
many impulses have to co-operate that arbitrary restric- 
tions upon any considerable number of them would defeat 
the purpose (which can only be the interest of the organi- 
sation) for which they were imposed. It is found in prac- 
tice that as men cannot behave systematically better than 
they naturally will to do, they are best left to the free 
play of their best, or naturally strongest, impulses. Still 
it is only by degrees that this generalisation comes to be 
accepted in all its breadth, and it may perhaps be ob- 
jected that if there is a certain normal type of humanity 
toward which individual men tend more or less to approxi- 
mate, and which it would be their perfection to realise, 
law, speaking in the name of the general good, might 
enjoin whatever sacrifices of private inclination appeared 
to the legislative mind conducive to that end, and insist 
upon the community behaving better than its own nature 
prompts. Such a confusion of the spheres of law and 
morality is not uncommonly met with at a certain stage 
of civilisation, and the contrary principle does not find 
general acceptance until a tolerably wide experience of 
various regimes, from the inquisitorial to the anarchic, has 
shown the practical convenience and expediency of the 
liberal maxim, and proved a posteriori the impossibility of 
securing profitable obedience to laws which the subject 
population is either generally averse to obeying, or alto- 
gether incapable of obeying with the indispensable mini- 
mum of intelligence. 

If law is the formula of natural tendency, we can under- 
stand that the most elementary natural right of individual 
men should be to exist as they naturally do ; but the just, 
or the practical best, as regards the relations of men among 
themselves, is not to be confounded with the ideal best, or 



CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LAW. 



57 



good ; it is simply the best result possible from the actual 
balance of real, more or less incompatible tendencies. 
The chief good of every existing thing is to exist as fully 
or perfectly after its kind as it can. If we put ourselves 
in the place of any existing unit, those things are good, for 
the unit, which promote its natural tendency to exist as 
much and as perfectly as it can; the unit is good in 
relation to other units, in so far as it furthers their several 
tendencies towards perfect existence, and it is bad, for 
them, in so far as it impedes the same. In ruling human 
societies, the practical best is the course which entails 
least permanent sacrifice of naturalhuman power and will. 1 
The judgments which common sense spontaneously up- 
holds as just are those which secure individuals in the 
possession and exercise of their own natural powers of 
doing and enjoying, subject to a due regard for the similar 
liberty of their neighbours. Just laws, or statements of 
real human relations at their best, are those which secure 
every class in the possession of its natural right to be its 
best self, that is to say, a self as much alive as possible, 
and related by as many good offices as possible to as many 
as possible of its coevals. Natural right or justice does 
not secure to individuals or classes the indulgence of all 
their wishes, either at their own or at the public expense, 
but it demands for them full exercise and development for 
all their permanent tastes and all their serviceable facul- 
ties. 

Assuming the natural good or interest of the social 
organism to consist in the normal and harmonious develop- 
ment of the greatest possible number of natural faculties 
in the fullest possible perfection amongst its members, it 
is evident that the last relics of a belief in the natural 
" rights of man," apart from use or law, must be given up, 
as completely as Austin himself could desire. Eight and 
justice are not arbitrary creations, they have a natural 
and necessary being in every human society, but they do 
not exist absolutely in vacuous eternity, out of all relation 

1 See Addenda C, page 366. 



53 



NA TURAL LA W. 



to the acts and sufferances of sensible beings. It is of 
course possible, and sometimes useful, to classify rights 
in order of generality, and as the correlative of jus, or 
obligation in its widest sense, we may understand by the 
natural rights of individuals, their claim to all the advan- 
tages which the general good requires them to enjoy. But 
the individual's property in such advantages is not abso- 
lute (though it might possibly be argued that a jural right 
is the only true and inalienable property), and it should be 
remembered, in asserting any claim to them, that it is the 
public, not private, interest that weighs in favour of its 
recognition. 

Justice is fitly represented with a balance, for the just 
is always half on one side and half on the other. One 
man's right is another man's obligation, and men's obliga- 
tions to each other are reciprocal. Justice consists in the 
perfect proportioning of these obligations, and gives effect 
to the natural claims men make upon each other, in order 
of their inward strength and outward usefulness. The 
right of the strongest claim to be attended to first does 
not lie in the bare fact of its strength, or power to compel 
attention, but in its strength as compared with other 
claims, that would be as good if they were as strong, that 
are as good if they are supported and re-enforced by ex- 
ternal sympathetic tendencies which make the balance of 
power lie on their side. Justice consecrates the perma- 
nently dominant tendencies of men, and the special, almost 
religious feeling with which the decisions of justice are 
received, is a spontaneous evidence that the permanent 
realities of tendency in the relations of men have moral 
qualities over and above the bare fact of common reality. 
When our natural feeling, and our thought and feeling about 
the feeling, point one way, the tendency is normal as well 
as natural, that is to say, it harmonises with all the fixed 
conditions under which the kind exists, as well as with a 
portion of its instincts. Our respect for the just comes, not 
from its being what the majority do, but from its being 



CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LAW. 



59 



what tlie majority wish to have done. The treacherous 
element of self-will is eliminated, and the practical best 
is estimated dispassionately by the common reason after 
weighing and balancing the common impulses. 

To wish for a thing, or to find it useful, does not give a 
natural right to its possession or enjoyment; possession 
itself may be nine parts of the law, but it is not even one 
part of justice ; only, as it happens, for the actual posses- 
sion of anything to have become firmly established, such 
possession must have been originally fairly compatible 
with or conducive to the general interest, which is then 
concerned in protecting its security. It is a part of that 
imperfection of human affairs, to which, as already ob- 
served, we owe the existence of law and the conception 
of justice, that even the most elementary natural rights 
can lapse into disuse. There are whole classes, sometimes 
amounting to the majority of a community, who do not 
possess or exercise faculties which it would be eminently 
conducive to the general good for them both to possess 
and exercise — to which, therefore, they have the most 
indefeasible right ; but this right, in the successful asser- 
tion of which the common good is deeply interested, is not 
vested in them as individuals, as classes, nor even as the 
majority, and the common good requires that the members 
of any oppressed section of the community should have 
the magnanimity to demand the emancipation to which 
they are entitled as right, not as their right. Neither the 
capitalist nor the sans-culotte have abstract rights against 
society ; there is a social right, if we knew what it was — 
a just practical Best — and both have a right to what it is 
best for the commonwealth that they should have — and to 
nothing more, less, or different ; but they themselves, un- 
fortunately, are likely to be the last people to help us in 
ascertaining what that true " natural right " is. 

The legalisation of local or class usages is an inter- 
mediate step between the practice of societies where all 
customs are generally binding, and those in which the law 



6o 



NATURAL LAW. 



is chiefly occupied in protecting the free initiative of indi- 
viduals. The saying acted on from ancient times, " Guique 
in sua arte credendum est," tacitly admits that there is (for 
instance) no typically just "law merchant" existing antece- 
dently to the establishment of usages amongst merchants ; 
and law and justice would have no further concern than to 
sanction and enforce such usages, were it not that political 
wisdom is not a part of any one's special " art," so that no 
class is " to be believed " on the question what is just 01 
otherwise from its members in their unprofessional rela- 
tions to each other or to a different class. The precepts of 
class morality afford a fairly sufficient rule of conduct 
while classes are as homogeneous as primitive society, and 
individuals are satisfied with the simple routine existence 
of their order ; and when this ceases to be the case, the 
precepts of personal morality in social matters are still 
regulated by those of class or customary morality. Most 
of the dangerous vagueness attendant on ideas of " natural 
right " comes from a confusion between the dictates of 
public and private morality, or rather from the optimistic 
assumption that the two will always spontaneously coin- 
cide. People assume themselves to have a natural right 
against society to do, at least, whatever they do not them- 
selves feel to be morally wrong, and certainly no duly en- 
lightened conscience would affirm an act of extreme social 
inexpediency to be morally right; but then few con- 
sciences are so enlightened as to be capable of estimating 
the social tendency of private acts, and therefore, though 
it may be practically impossible to improve upon the 
principle of respect for the free initiative of individuals, 
it cannot be maintained that all the results reached in 
accordance with that principle are absolutely just or right. 

In considering what classes of actions are regarded as 
naturally lawful or just, we have rather lost sight of the 
question, how law comes to possess a binding and con- 
straining power, though the answer has already been partly 
taken for granted. It is necessary for the maintenance of 



CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LA W. 61 

society that men should make certain sacrifices of their 
own inclinations in their dealings with each other. The 
law ordains that these sacrifices shall be made, but men 
do not feel obliged to make the sacrifices because the law 
commands, the law commands because men feel obliged 
to make them. And there is nothing very wonderful or 
mysterious in this feeling of necessity ; it is no news that 
human life is determined by other conditions than human 
desire, and consciousness of these conditions is conscious- 
ness of constraint, whether the constraint be direct or 
alternative. It might be surprising that men should 
acquiesce in these conditions if they had the choice of 
an " unchartered freedom " in their reach, but, if freedom 
must be unchartered, that is a fresh, and to man as he is, 
an unacceptable condition. 

From the earliest to the latest speculation on the sub- 
ject, the question concerning law and justice has been 
whether they are based upon nature or are of human — 
meaning personal and arbitrary — institution. We say 
human institutions are based upon human nature, are its 
voluntary and necessary expression and manifestation, or, 
in other words, that law is the organised liberty of all 
the members of a society, and obedience to law merely the 
Wille zum Leben 1 of the social organism. The obedience 
becomes conscious in man as all his other actions do: 
" rational action arises out of instinctive action when this 
grows too complex to be perfectly automatic." 2 The mul- 
titude of actual observances leads men to classify their 
conduct, or reduce it to rule; the multitude of rules 
leads to the substitution of the general conception of rules 
necessarily obeyed, for the thought of innumerable special 
conditions of necessary action, and it is not till this point 
has been reached, after long and hereditary experience, 
that the existence of a positive law, enjoining or forbid- 

1 Perhaps "vital self-will" is the best equivalent for this untranslat« 
able phrase of Schopenhauer's. 

2 Herbert Spencer's Principles of Psychology. 



NATURAL LAW. 



ding actions of a class, can be said to serve as a motive for 
their performance or omission. 

Most writers on the philosophy of law, having begun 
the treatment of their subject at a time when positive 
legislation was already complicated enough for obedience 
to it to be an act of faith rather than reason, naturally 
began by trying to account for the faith; and though 
their method was scarcely sufficiently historical for their 
attempts in this direction to be perfectly successful, the 
list of alternative explanations logically possible or con- 
ceivable was almost exhaustively discussed. In Greek 
philosophy generally, the nature of justice in itself was 
the object of inquiry; but the Eomans were brought, by 
the practical experience of which the jus gentium was the 
result, to the notion of a more comparative treatment, and 
seeking the common element in real svstems of law, natu- 
rally postponed their researches into the origin of law in 
general; for classification seems of itself a step towards 
explanation : when several things of a class exist, one 
seems partly to account for the other, so far as the mere 
existence is concerned, and what seems chiefly to need 
explanation, is the being of the class as an ideal entity, or 
the common properties by which it is constituted. To the 
later Latin jurists, and to most modern publicists, what 
seemed to want explaining was not the existence of this 
or that law, or of law in general, but the agreement of all, 
or most law ; why laws tended to be just, and for what 
reason they were generally obeyed. Merely logical ex- 
planation, however, though the only sort satisfactory to 
some minds, adds nothing to real knowledge, and can at 
most connect one phenomenon with a wider phenomenon 
of the same kind. Thus the civil law is referred to, or 
included under a natural law, as by the Eomans; this 
natural law is in its turn explained, as by the schoolmen, 
from a natural reason, which comes everywhere to the 
same conclusions, or by a natural morality, as in most 
writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, expres- 



CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LA W. 63 

sive either of the divine nature or the divine will. The 
genealogy itself was inspired partly by the common wish 
to arrive at something more ultimate than a fact, and 
partly by the more reasonable hope of finding, as it were, 
a " source " for the law, which is felt, and truly, to be not 
altogether self-imposed. But we do not find that there 
are any real historical processes corresponding to the steps 
in this genealogy, for the relief of law by equity does not 
represent any permanent distinction in principle, as if 
there were two kinds of justice for suitors to take their 
choice between, one a degree more general, abstract, and 
stable than the other. 

Voigt, 1 who admits that equity can be thought of as 
agreeing with law as well as at variance with it, vir- 
tually reduces the idea of the just or the " fair " to a 
commentary on the variable relation between the law 
and morality of each period. Equity, when established 
law is supposed to be just, may serve to determine the 
application of the law to cases; otherwise it is simply 
an artifice for keeping the administration of law on some 
points of general interest more nearly abreast with the 
latest popular notions of justice than the text of the statutes 
administered; and not a convenient artifice, because as 
soon as courts of equity are established, their practice tends 
to stiffen into a system, and has in its turn to be relieved 
by courts of appeal deciding merely on the merits of the 
case ; while it is plainly not for the interests of either law 
or justice to perpetuate a state of uncertainty amongst 
litigants, as to whether their causes will be tried according 
to rules of law, equity, or common sense. 

Another recent German writer 2 ends his investigation 
of the philosophical element in Eoman jurisprudence by 
declaring that the binding force of the jus gentium rests 

1 Die Lehre vom jus naturale, sequum et bonum und jus gentium der 
Romer, 

2 Hilclenbrand, Gescbichte und System der Rechts- und Staatsphilo- 
sophie. 



6 4 



NATURAL LAW. 



on the consensus of the human species, that of jus civile on 
the consensus of the state, and that of jus naturale in the 
subjection of man to the laws of nature — considered in 
relation to God ; in lieu of which last clause, by which the 
symmetry of the statement is somewhat impaired, we 
should propose to read that the force of the laws of nature 
rests on the wide natural consensus of existing beings to 
exist as they do. 

The source, from this point of view, of the external 
constraint which comes into the consciousness of the 
narrowing subject class as law, is always the fixity of 
relations amongst things natural and real, and the readi- 
ness of the will to acquiesce in restrictions which it 
perceives to be natural and unavoidable, certainly does 
not require more explanation than the reality of the re- 
strictions themselves. As the judicious Hooker observes, 
" Let Eeason teach impossibility in anything, and the Will 
of man doth let it go." And though such letting go may 
be altogether against the inclination of the will, which 
would gladly have had the thing possible, there is at least 
an intellectual relief in perceiving the order and relations 
of the impossibility. Coleridge, in speaking of the satis- 
faction found in accounting for a pain, says, "There is 
always a consolatory feeling that accompanies the sense 
of a proportion between antecedents and consequents. It 
is eternity revealing itself in the form of time." And 
this is only a transcendental expression of the gospel of 
necessarianism. To see two events as cause and effect is 
to see them in an inseparable relation, as, in a sense, one 
to the mind, after which it becomes impossible to separate 
them in serious practical speculation ; to know that things, 
being what they are, could not in any single particular 
have been other, or therefore better, is to see in this the 
best of all possible worlds, because any fictitious possi- 
bility which the play of thought or fancy may suggest is 
unreal — or it would be realised — is not really possible. 

It is curious to observe how all theories of the origin 



CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LA W. 65 

of law, whether metaphysical or political, whether, that 
is, they refer to nature or to will as the ultimate source 
of its authority, gradually gravitate towards the recogni- 
tion of a power felt to be supreme of fact and of right, 
as the only logical base of legal obedience. The power 
must be supreme of fact, or there is no true compulsion ; 
it must be allowed supreme of right, or the will itself is 
not compelled, and when both conditions are satisfied in 
the voluntary obedience to an irresistible force, or the 
complete identification of the weaker with the stronger 
tendency (we cannot here say will without anthropo- 
morphism), the reign of law is established. 

When the individual is first becoming conscious of his 
own personality as distinguished from that of others, he 
seems naturally to personify all the necessities he en- 
counters, as a preliminary towards complying with them. 
But this uncritical docility does not easily survive the 
multiplication of laws resting on the same authority ; these 
supply a standard for themselves to be tried by, and un- 
less they are all such as the subject will can and does 
spontaneously accept, the law and the lawgiver lose their 
authority together. Within the range of modern history 
we can trace three main phases of feeling about or towards 
the nature and conduct of this Supreme power, with three 
corresponding forms of doctrine concerning the ground and 
extent of man's subjection to it. Scholastic philosophy, 
taking for granted the foundation of a sincere theological 
faith, confines itself to an ex parte statement of the posi- 
tive elements in the divine law. The expositor recognises a 
real distinction between things mala in se and things mala 
quia prohibita, but it does not occur to him to criticise 
the existence of things bad in themselves when he is prais- 
ing the excellence of the divine appointments which cause 
such natural evil to be condemned by the common law of 
nature. The precepts of revelation are not conceived as 
possessing the same elementary kind of philosophical neces- 
sity. Obedience to them is only necessary to man because 

E 



66 



NATURAL LAW. 



God has willed the command, and it is an act of faith to 
believe that whatever God commands is both naturally and 
supernaturally good. From the twelfth to the sixteenth 
century philosophy was spontaneously on the side of 
authority; the laws of God and man were better than 
anarchy, and the time had not yet come for trying all 
ordinances, whencesoever derived, by some common ideal 
standard other than their objective authority. Kevela- 
tion made a duty of loyalty to political superiors, so 
that positive law might be conceived as in effect de- 
claratory of the divine law, while the transgressions of 
political potentates failed to compromise the divine 
authority, since they might always be condemned by a 
still higher organ of the divine will — the authorised spiri- 
tual power. Suarez, one of the latest and most circum- 
stantial exponents of this philosophy of law, explicitly as- 
serts a " natural right " of sovereignty in the people over 
whom the prince rules by divine sufferance and human 
consent, and with this concession we come to the end of 
the period during which goodness is praised as conform- 
able to the divine will, while the divine will is never 
summoned to prove its conformity to its own creation — 
natural goodness. 

In the theological period, it may be observed that law 
is conceived more dynamically, and as it were construc- 
tively, than is usual, as enjoining what men are to do, 
rather than as stating the conditions subject to which they 
may do as they feel inclined, and it is in this way parallel 
to the precepts of customary morality, which are of abso- 
lute force for a time, but have not the logical necessity be- 
longing to relations deduced from other relations. It was 
reserved for the civilians to stultify the premises which 
they borrowed partly from theology, by inquiries in which 
Puffendorf especially is much entangled, whether God has "a 
riffht" to command the obedience of His creatures. The arid 
abstractions of scholasticism are at least precise and inter- 
nally coherent, and Suarez keeps clear of the absurdity of 



CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LA W. 67 



proffering a reason for the ultimate fact, which explains 
itself to every hona fide believer in a Deity, since religious 
belief is simply being bound by the will, so far as known 
or conjectured, of the deity believed in. In his own 
dialect, " lex participata supponit legem per essentiam sed 
lex per essentiam seterna est:" and boldly confronting the 
difficulty of a free will in a fixed nature, he concludes that 
God Himself acts by the rules of His own right reason, 
while the laws He has appointed for man are, as a fact, 
just and according to reason, as well as efficacious to 
oblige, the two things required in the idea of law. 

A sincere belief that the divine ordinance is the sole 
source of lawful obligation naturally affects the resolution 
of the question much debated by casuists, Whether by human 
laws the conscience be obliged or no ; " for if conscience be 
not," says J eremy Taylor, " then nothing is concerned but 
prudence, and care that a man be safe from the rods and 
axes ; but then" (he was not alone in thinking) " the world 
would quickly find that fear would be but a weak defence to 
her laws ; which force or wit or custom or riches would so 
much enervate or so often evacuate." The will of God as 
conceived by any one generation binds those of that gene- 
ration who recognise nothing in His will that their will 
does not fully identify itself with. But men make 
gods after their own image, and the image frequently sur- 
vives the maker, whose descendants may, for a space, be 
bound by belief in the existence of sanctions of such 
cogency as to compel an obedience that has become reluc- 
tant ; only as the force of sanctions is relative and depen- 
dent on the disposition of the subject will, should that 
become increasingly reluctant to obey, the law, if it is so 
far from necessary that it can be habitually broken, is 
ipso facto abrogated, shown not to state necessary rela- 
tions following from the nature of things real. 

The last question for the advocates of the political 
theory of law, or its origin by institution, is thus seen to 
be : Can the divine will be resisted and the divine lav 



63 



NATURAL LAW. 



be disobeyed ? And the answer to this belongs to theo- 
logy, not to moral or political philosophy, though it can- 
not fairly be evaded by theists, whose systems depend 
upon the answer that can be given to it. "We need only 
observe that Calvinism, the only theology since that of 
mediaeval Catholicism with any pretensions to scientific 
completeness and insight, honestly allows that an omni- 
potent ruler, creating, ordering, and sustaining everything 
that exists, neither is nor can be conceived as having His 
purposes frustrated by the creatures of His own will, and 
that therefore the law of God ordains the condemnation ot 
sinners in a sense which makes an expression of ordinary 
moral disapprobation for sin inappropriate. Modern theo- 
logy virtually has to make' its choice between this opinion 
— that what God does is right in some supernatural sense, 
even when it seems and is humanly speaking bad (as in 
the election of sinners to damnation) — and that of ration- 
alistic optimism, according to which everything however 
really or apparently bad will somehow come to good in the 
long run. But neither of these hypotheses exhibit such a 
necessary relation between the will of God and man as to 
enable us to deduce the uniformities of human conduct 
from the nature and being of the two. A legislator who 
makes his subjects as well as his laws has failed in one or 
other of his functions if the laws are habitually broken, 
whether the reason of the breach be that the will of the 
subject rejects them as bad, or that the nature of the sub- 
ject is bad, i.e., imperfect or abnormal and irregular in 
its manifestations. And since the laws which we have 
best grounds for calling divine are seen empirically to be 
but imperfectly binding on man, we conclude the rela- 
tion between man and God — if there be a God — not to be 
the relation of omnipotent sovereign and lawful subject; 
and accordingly a secular theory of law must seek else- 
where for the seat of supreme power and the source of real 
obligation. 

The second stage of feeling and speculation had, as 



CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LAW. 



69 



already implied, less internal consistency than the theo- 
logical theory in its purity. Criticism did not go so far as 
to question the morality of the divine law, but the schism 
which agitated Christendom seemed to leave every portion 
of so-called divine law open to discussion, in which the 
claim to authority had to be justified by an appeal to the 
merits of the law ; and, in fact, the civilian founders of the 
Utilitarian philosophy virtually took their own estimate of 
natural right as the expression of that law of nature which 
they could, on the one hand, invoke as an authority with 
secularists, and, on the other, praise to the religious as a 
precious gift of all- wise Providence. Bentham and Austin 
have little to add to Puffendorf's assertion that God pre- 
scribes to men the duties calculated to give them the hap- 
piness they so earnestly desire; and Bishop Cumberland 
(who describes moral obligation as an act of the legislator 
showing the .particular conduct enjoined to be necessary 
for the person who is to follow it) concludes that, given the 
knowledge of a necessary dependence between the pursuit 
of the common good and the happiness of each individual, 
each individual is certainly obliged to seek that good, 
which proves the law of nature to be duly and truly " pro- 
mulgated." Writers, on the other hand, who attribute a 
metaphysical sanctity to the chief moral conceptions actu- 
ally entertained by mankind, either derive those concep- 
tions from the Essence of the Deity conceived as absolutely 
good, which Cumberland not unfairly objects to, as virtu- 
ally defining a thing by itself ; or else confine themselves 
to arguing that the sanctity in question cannot be ex- 
plained by an arbitrary act of will. " When things exist," 
says Cudworth, " they are what they are, not by will or 
arbitrary command, but by the necessity of their own 
nature ; " so that, given things with ultimate moral quali- 
ties, the moral qualities of their mutual relations would 
follow by a logical necessity. Leibnitz is at the pains to 
protest against Puffendorf for making duty consist in obe- 
dience to law, and law consist in the will of a superior that 



7o 



NATURAL LAW. 



such and such, acts shall be done, when the very schoolmen 
declare " voluntas non est regula," and no one is content 
to rest his claim to authority on a law of his own making 
commanding obedience. To which Barbeyrac retorts that 
" the nature of things " cannot impose an obligation on us, 
which, with lawyers of his school, includes the idea of 
"right" in the person imposing it, a right, according to 
them, which no one but a recognised superior possesses : 
but this, as we observed at starting, is an ambiguous quali- 
fication, and the one word "recognised" virtually concedes 
Cudworth's position, that "it is not the mere will and 
pleasure of him that commandeth that obligeth to do posi- 
tive things commanded, but the intellectual nature of him 
that is commanded." Eeal as is the difference involved in 
the two shades of opinion, it has had no influence on the 
theory of law itself, for the only practical question between 
the disputants was whether the precepts of a naturally 
binding law should be strengthened by the discovery of a 
pre-established harmony between them and the divine will, 
or whether the perfection of the divine nature should be 
demonstrated by the excellence of the precepts appointed 
for the regulation of the natural world. 

The third period of criticism is that into which we have 
drifted since conceptions of natural perfection and ideal 
order have begun to form themselves, in comparison with 
which the "'laws of nature," at then best, are harsh and 
ruthless; and while we conceive these ideals themselves 
to be altogether of natural growth, now that they are formed, 
they serve to condemn, not the laws of their own forma- 
tion, but the facts which retarded it, and still retard their 
realisation. These conceptions do not owe their virtue 
to any belief in the sacredness of their source ; we know 
their power consists only in the strength of conviction 
with which they are cherished, but no one questions their 
"right" to adhesion should they happen to receive it, the 
only question is whether the inevitable tendency of natural 
fact will procure it them. The consciousness of obligation 



CUSTOMARY AND POSITIVE LA W. 71 



is in the subject, but the reality of obligation, or compul- 
sion so exercised as to control and alter the direction of 
the subject will, must exist in nature if the obligation is to 
be felt permanently as binding. The great law of nature 
which no man can break or annul, is the existence of all 
natural objects after their kind ; and this law has no other 
standard of right than the facts it proclaims, for, though 
the general good consists in the orderly existence of kinds 
in their perfection, it is only because real existence is 
orderly that we regard what is abnormal as imperfect of 
its kind and so contrary to the general good, of which the 
observance of law is the chief condition. No one but a 
madman would ask if fire has " a right " to burn us ; it 
cannot help doing so, and the " right " of human societies 
to make laws regulating the intercourse of their members, 
and the right of moral causes to produce effects after their 
kind, are of the same natural hyper-rational sufficiency. 

The few frail or diseased wills that cannot accept and 
identify themselves with the supreme tendency of the 
universe to exist as it does — or as it best can — cease before 
their time out of the land of the living sharers in the ten- 
dency; but the immense majority of men submit peace- 
ably to the laws imposed on them by the force which they 
feel to be irresistible — the tendency of contemporary being ; 
and this for reasons substantially identical with those 
acknowledged by the most intelligent advocates of the 
theory which ascribes the force of law to its imposition by 
a superior will. Sincere theists who believe all things to 
follow the laws divinely appointed for their guidance, obey 
the laws they feel to be binding on themselves as a reli- 
gious duty, because their will is one with the will of the 
God they believe in. Consistent naturalists see in the 
fixed relations of the natural world the norm of natural 
human life, and in the fact that nature is thus and thus 
become conscious of an efficient — though not of a final — 
cause for living according to nature. 



III. 



MORALITY. 



*'Da ist's derm wieder, wie die Sterne wollten : 
Bedingung und Gesetz und aller Wille 
1st nur ein Wollen, weil wir eben sollten, 
Und vor dem Willen schweigt die Willkiir stille ; 
Das Liebste wird vom Herzen weggescholten, 
Dem harten Muss bequemt sicb Will' und Grille, 
So sind wir scheinfrei denn, nacb mancben Jahren, 
Nur enger dann, als wir am Anfang waren." 

Goethe. 

" Constat itaque ex his omnibus, nihil nos conari, velle, appetere, neque 
oupere, quia id bonum esse judicamus, sed contra nos propterea aliquid 
bonum esse judicare, quia id conamur, volumus, appetimus, atque cup- 
imus."— Spinoza. 

" Die Abhangigkeit eines nicht schlechterdings guten Willens, vom Princip 
der Autonomie (die moralische Nothigung) ist Verbindlichkeit. Die objec- 
tive Nothwendigkeit einer Handlung aus Verbindlichkeit heisst Pflicht." — 
Kant. 

" Subject to himself— which were not subjection, but freedom." — Hobbes. 
" Motives are symptoms of weakness and supplements for the deficient 
energy of the living principle, the law within us."— Coleridge. 



Feeling of obligation merely consciousness of causation — Habit not a cause — 
Difficulty of separating tbe practical and speculative side of moral pro- 
blems — Duty always conceived in relation to a person bound by tbe duty 
and conscious of tbe bond — Divergent theories of obligation, tbeistic, 
sentimental, and utilitarian — Right being relative to tbe conscience, what 
is the good commonly thought right or moral ? — Three kinds of good : 
natural good, the perfection of a thing after its kind, ascertained not a 
priori but by eclectic experience ; sensible good or pleasure, included in, 
but not coextensive with natural good ; moral good tbe pursuit of natural 
good through natural obstacles which make the pursuit self-conscious — 
Such obstacles threefold : r. The imperfection of the world, including 
human society, which may make the natural exercise of normal faculties 
difficult or painful. 2. Imperfection of the organism after its kind ; con- 
flicting appetites, the indulgence of some of which is incompatible with 
complete natural perfection. 3. The instability of the specific type, the 
goal of natural perfection receding with the evolution of fresh faculties 
— Utilitarianism wrong because the pursuit of natural and that of sen- 
sible good do not always coincide, and because it fails to include evolu- 
tion, or development of the moral ideal — A morality of some kind, or 
formula of obligation imposed by the nature of the agent in its fixed 
relations with the surrounding medium, exists necessarily, supposing 
men to have a specific nature, with certain tendencies that are liable to 
be impeded, but do not therefore cease to be real, only become present 
to consciousness, if so it chances, as a constraint upon the equally natu- 
ral (but not morally necessary) inclination towards a sensible good — The 
tendencies commonly called moral, those which conduce to the natural 
good of the kind — A kind could not subsist with essentially self-destruc- 
tive tendencies — Practically, morality begins with the discovery that it 
is not always possible to do as we like, that some sacrifices are unavoid- 
able : the sacrifices which it is called moral to make are those which men 
are conscious of a real natural tendency to make or to desire to make, 
those, namely, which conduce most, not to the sensible good of the indi- 
vidual which, by the hypothesis was unavoidably sacrificed, but to its 
natural good or perfection — The sacrifice of the natural good {e.g., life) of 
the organism only liable to become moral because the individual man is 
member of a social body, so that his natural perfection includes the dis- 
charge of social functions, after their kind, i.e., in the manner most con- 
ducive to the natural good or perfection of the social body. 



Ill 



MORALITY. 

In" the foregoing section we endeavoured to assimilate 
human laws "properly so called" to the scientific laws 
of nature, by suggesting that consciousness and causation 
are not incompatible, and that the sense of constraint 1 
which undoubtedly belongs to human law is most in- 
telligible and explicable if conceived as the mere addition 
of consciousness to a real causal, or fixed order of relations, 
as, in fact, the consciousness of causation; not the mere 
perception that a fixed order exists, but a direct conscious- 
ness of the steps in such an order as succeeding each other, 
without, perhaps against, the desire of the conscious subject. 

A real tendency or impulse in the subject towards the 
effecting of any particular result, becomes present to con- 
sciousness as a desire for that result. Such a desire may 
be felt as an additional force or motive for following the 
impulse or tendency of which it is the consciousness, but 
conscious volition is not consciousness of constraint, and 
to produce this, we must conceive a second force, inde- 
pendent of the first and brought into relation with it. 

Men become conscious of law as a check on desire; 
yet their desires are in the main normal (or the abortive 
race would perish), and they on the whole desire to be 
governed by the laws which they feel to be at times a 
restraint, at times a protection, and for the rest a just 
and reasonable custom. The feeling of voluntary action 
under constraint, or in other words of free human action 
subject to law, is given when the subject is conscious 
of a present, spontaneous impulse to act in a given way, 
which impulse is impeded or diverted by the existence 

1 See Addenda D. , page 366. 



76 



NA TURAL LAW. 



of other present, persistent forces, towards which the 
subject stands already in a necessary relation of co- 
existence; the permanent outer influence overrules the 
ephemeral inner desire, and we gradually come to class 
together as lawful those desires which habitually conform 
to the objective pressure. 

In distinguishing the laws of human conduct as political, 
moral, or religious, according to their presumed source, and 
the sphere of their apparent jurisdiction, we only follow 
a classification too general to be quite baseless or unsound. 
When external constraint is absent, there must still be 
law wherever there is intelligible life, and we suppose 
that even if men did not naturally associate with each 
other, every human organism would still possess certain 
fixed properties or dispositions, by which its conduct 
under various conditions would be regulated, and which, 
consequently, would be, at. least to some extent, a possible 
object of knowledge. Even when the power of custom is 
strongest, and men have so few unshared impulses that 
an impulse to do something of itself indifferent, may be 
disapproved of as abnormal, merely because it is not 
shared, there is still always a part, and as civilisation 
advances, and custom makes way for law, an increasing 
part of the daily existence of each several member of the 
community left at his own disposal, subject to no other 
restrictions than such as his own nature and the general 
constitution of the universe may impose. Unlike law, 
and like custom, which is a fusion of both, morality has 
as many positive as negative rules ; for though a man's 
neighbours are not always concerned— as they in time 
discover — in prescribing to him exactly in what way he 
is to act, he himself finds it natural and necessary to act 
always in some way, and all ways are hedged in by fixed 
conditions ; and to go on acting consciously and regularly 
in any way whatever, without the immediate instigation 
of personal desire, is to act from habit, calculation, or 
duty. 



MORALITY. 



77 



The effect of habit is generally seen in the repetition of 
acts not themselves productive either of pleasure or pain, 
nor yet regarded as means to a more remote, probably 
pleasurable, end. Custom is only the habit of a number, 
and both owe their strength, partly to the original cause, 
whatever it was, which led to the formation of the habit 
or custom, partly to the peculiarity of human or animal 
nature (much conducive to the fixity of types and species), 
that other things being equal, any action is more easily 
performed a second time than the first, or that, of actions 
of equal natural difficulty, the one that has already been 
performed once, will be easier than the one which has not. 
But the difficulty of breaking a habit, and even of altering 
a custom, is rather physical or material than moral ; the 
existence of a habit is not felt to be a motive to the will 
for perseverance in it ; it is not recognised to be a duty to 
keep the specific type unaltered; in fact, to be con- 
scious that habit is the disposing cause of an action 
is distinctly not to feel the action as obligatory, and 
if morality consists in the consciousness of a subjective 
necessity, as law in the consciousness of a necessity 
imposed from without, it is obvious that the idea of 
right, or of things that in common parlance " ought " 
to be done, cannot be derived from usage. Habit is only 
a real motive through its effect on the organism, and 
Aristotle's dictum that no law of nature can be altered by 
habit is explained when we remember that a true law im- 
plies more than one set of constant relations, and that the 
conditions of the relations, on one side at least, cannot be 
directly affected by a mere act of will ; and since, as the 
same authority observes, all habits are formed by acts of 
like nature, the habit does not explain the action : a habit 
universal enough to modify the specific type must have 
been natural to begin with. 

The chief difficulty of this part of the subject is in- 
separable from its nature. "We cannot separate the in- 
tellectual and the practical aspects of the problem. Our 



7S 



NATURAL LAW. 



daily conduct must be influenced by our moral theories ; 
and our theories are based on history and reason without 
reference to expediency. But, in morals alone, the credi- 
bility of a view is associated with its practical merits, and 
the best judges do not feel as if a theory were true unless 
the statement of it inspires something more than assent. 
We take for granted that the true ethical system upholds all 
moral obligations, and therefore it seems that every moral 
philosopher is ipso facto a preacher or teacher of morals, 
and his philosophy is faulty if it can be believed without 
being acted upon. An intellectual truth ought to be con- 
vincing to every sane mind, but many persons of sane 
mind are morally perverse, and the apprehension of an 
abstract truth does not necessarily affect the will. To 
know whence the majority of mankind derive such moral 
virtue as they have, is not necessarily to feel moved 
towards the acquisition, in one's own person, of more virtue 
than before. And yet, if the argument is given in its 
logical simplicity and aloofness from personal feeling, it 
seems incomplete, because the feeling of the majority is 
the minor premise which we have no right to ignore. 

On the other hand, the argument has no right to assume 
that any given reader is one of the majority, whose feeling 
supplies the base of our general conclusions. The science 
of morals is on a par with the science of medicine. It 
treats indifferently of the conditions of health and disease, 
and has no power to alter concrete matters of fact, or save 
the heir of diseased appetites from the natural con- 
sequences of their indulgence or repression. It proclaims 
the sanctions of the law of nature, and leaves men to obey 
or defy the law as they please. But the law is there, 
and those who are not inclined to defy it, have a right to 
treat the substance of the law and its natural mode of 
administration, as parts of the same subject, and to take 
its working for granted in the exposition of its principles. 

Voluntary spontaneous action, while unchecked, does 
not give the idea of necessity or constraint, and whatever 



MORALITY. 



79 



theory be adopted concerning the nature or source of the 
common notions of duty, morality, or moral obligation, it 
will scarcely be denied either that such notions really exist 
and are of force, or that their force in particular cases is 
felt as binding. Moral actions are actions done because the 
doer of them believes it right that they should be done, and 
right is seldom more clearly defined than as that which 
some one " ought " to do. When men at a certain stage 
in the development of moral ideas, say we or I " ought " 
to do so and so, and are asked " Why ? " they sometimes 
give as the reason that quality in the act by which they 
have recognised it as incumbent. They knew that it was 
what had to be done by the token that it was good, fit, 
admirable, useful, or the like ; but the further question, 
why what is good, fit, admirable, or useful has to be done, 
is apt to elicit the most conclusive, and, saving the pre- 
judice of logicians, the most logical of answers : " Because 
it has." But if we examine further into the nature of that 
which has, or ought to be done, we find nothing anterior 
to the speaker's conviction that he must and will do it if 
he can. 

If we consider the current ideas of duty, we shall find 
that they all include the conception of relation to the 
person on whom the duty is incumbent. The verb ex- 
pressive of right doing is irregular, and though the cate- 
gorical imperative is not a "shalt" but a "must," it is 
only in the first person singular that we read always 
" ought," which is practically a " must " acquiesced in by 
the will. " I ought " has a meaning for everybody, and 
"we" or "you ought" only extends the obligation to other 
men in the name of a common humanity. But we have 
no conception of duty, our own or other people's, apart 
from the inward conviction or subjective sense of moral 
obligation. We may say, it is the duty of this or that man 
or woman to act thus and thus, but the judgment always 
rests on the preliminary assumption that the person in 
question has the same sense of right and wrong as our- 



8o 



NATURAL LAW. 



selves. The farther assumption of the existence of some 
uniform, objective rule of right conduct exterior to the con- 
sciences of mankind does not interfere with our belief that 
people in general ought to do what they themselves think 
and feel to be right; and we involuntarily form a quite dif- 
ferent judgment of persons who, we think, have mistaken 
their duty, and of persons who knowingly fail in the 
performance of the duties they recognise. In the attempt 
to determine our neighbour's duties, we are always divided 
between a conviction that the right is one and unalterable, 
and an impression, based on personal experience and the 
natural meaning of words, that it cannot be morally right 
for any one to do what he believes to be wrong. 

The inference is obvious : the class of actions enjoined 
by the moral law may be deter m ined conjointly by the 
nature of the individual man, and that of the real world 
in which he is circumstanced thus or thus ; but if consent 
is necessary to all law, the sanction of morality, the source 
of the inward feeling of obligation which we have to 
explain, must be sought "within the breast." The ex- 
istence of morality as a something binding the will is 
purely and necessarily subjective ; we have the data for 
passing moral judgments on ourselves, but on no one else ; 
though, in practice, it may reasonably be assumed that 
beings of the same kind will experience the same natural 
necessities, and will follow in their conduct the same laws, 
moral as well as physical. But the real and satisfactory 
explanation of the phenomenon would certainly be a full 
and intelligible account of the growth and limitations of 
this subjective sense of obligation, as attached under cer- 
tain circumstances to certain kinds of action. 

Positive law regulates the overt acts of man in society ; 
the moral law regulates the disposition of the will in 
accordance with which men act. Positive law, it is ad- 
mitted, should be moral, and certain moral duties may be 
fitly enforced by legal sanctions. But the fact that the 
two systems of regulation coincide for a part of their 



MORALITY. 



8i 



extent, does not make them mutually dependent, the 
external power or source of obligation is not the same, 
and the inward consent of the will which gives effect to 
the outer pressure has, in each case, a different set of 
antecedents and a different history of growth. 

In speaking of positive or customary morality as an 
early phase of social law, we did not find that the generality 
of a practice explained its existence, though it might help 
for a time to perpetuate it. An observance that is only 
kept up because it has been customary is sure, sooner or 
later, to pass into disuse, for individuals do not feel bound 
in conscience by the habits of their neighbours any more 
than by their own. There must be a cause or motive in 
present operation to affect the will with the sense of 
necessity or constraint which is as essential a part of 
morality as Of law. The present opinion of the majority 
of mankind does not give such a cause or motive, because 
mankind is made up of individuals, and it is the opinion of 
individual men that we want to have explained. Morality 
is a matter of personal opinion or sentiment, and con- 
formity to the opinions or sentiments of the majority is 
not felt to be in itself a moral duty. There is nothing 
intrinsically immoral in the position of Atlianasius contra 
mundum, and the general similarity between the moral 
judgments which we all naturally pass, the substantial 
consensus of human opinion as to what is right and wrong, 
what ought, and ought not to be done, is sufficiently ac- 
counted for by the judgments and opinions being formed 
under the same general conditions by beings of the same 
kind or nature. But the existence and the tenor of the 
opinions on those points separately reached by individuals 
is as far from explanation as ever. 

The opinions that men have entertained about their own 
moral ideas differ more than the ideas themselves, and the 
only objection to an eclectic theory, taken entirely from 
known and accredited works on ethics, is that in each one, 
amongst nine points of agreement with the rest, there ia 

F 



82 



NATURAL LAW. 



always one point of difference, so that, whether the one or 
the many are right in any particular case, it is evident 
that the many are never right in all. When possible 
points of divergence are practically innumerable, and yet 
so far from essential, controversy is apt to be lengthy in 
proportion to the number of common premises, which, 
unaccountably, fail to lead disputants to the same results. 
Every system has a different reason to give for dissenting 
from each of its rivals, and each reason involves some 
assumption to which rival systems would agree in demur- 
ring, though, again, all for different reasons. The objec- 
tions that can be urged against a merely naturalistic theory 
of the origin of morality take a different form according to 
the objectors' own opinions, and the answer that would 
meet one statement of a real difficulty may fall, or seem 
to fall, wide of, perhaps, the same difficulty stated in a 
different way. 

What has been already said of the theories which 
ascribe the force of positive law in the last resort to the 
will or act of a divine legislator, applies equally to the 
cognate explanation of the existence and cogency of the 
moral law. The many advocates of a pure and lofty 
morality, who believe its precepts to be of divine institu- 
tion, are conscious of no other ground than this belief for 
the morality they practise, and are, therefore, sincerely per- 
suaded that without religious theism the existence of 
morality would be left to the accidents of natural tempera- 
ment and hereditary disposition, and could not be expected, 
as a rule, to survive exposure to the natural obstacles and 
hindrances to virtuous life with which the world abounds. 
They argue, like Voltaire, that if God did not exist, it 
would be necessary to invent him, as the cheapest way of 
strengthening the hands of the police ; and there are some- 
timid sceptics who so far agree with them as to half be- 
lieve in the desirability of both respecting and preserving 
the illusions of the majority, while the fulness of irre- 
ligious truth is reserved for the few whose passions have 



MORALITY. 



S3 



"been chilled by a life of study, or who have learnt by expe- 
rience the reasonableness and prudence of self-control. 

If, however, we suppose human ideas, feelings, and 
beliefs to have been evolved by a continuation of the 
natural process which fixed the nature of the things 
thought, felt, or known about, and to correspond in essen- 
tials to their material counterparts, we shall find it diffi- 
cult to account for the rise of a general illusion or baseless 
belief, and almost impossible to understand how such an 
illusion should be an essential condition of the prosperity 
and subsistence of the species entertaining it. Theolo- 
gians and naturalists may join issue if they please on the 
preliminary question whether a Deity exists, but nothing 
save confusion can result from their going off into specu- 
lations, not whether there is a God or no, but whether it 
would be a good thing if there were, and further, sup- 
posing that to be conceded, whether it would be a good 
thing to believe there were, even if there really were not. 

The objection which the various theories of morality 
that may be classed as sentimental would lay most stress 
upon, as against a theory of mere realism, is psychological. 
Morality includes a sentiment about certain acts, as well 
as a real tendency, desire, or intention to do them ; and if 
moral acts are done, by a simple natural necessity, it is 
asked, and with reason, why we do not consider all acts 
performed in accordance with natural laws as moral. The 
objection admits of being retorted, for granting that the 
moral sentiments of men were all alike, and sufficiently 
strong to determine their conduct, there is nothing in the 
habitual prevalence of certain sentiments to give the feel- 
ing of obligation, to make men think it their duty to have 
the same sentiments as their neighbours, or to have always 
the same sentiments themselves. And as simple feeling 
in our own persons does not give the idea of morality, 
a fortiori, it is not to be expected that reflected emotion or 
feeling for others should do so ; and accordingly no further 
light is cast on the question by the half-and-half form of 



S4 



NATURAL LAW. 



utilitarianism, which supposes men to feel bound to do as 
they like, but premises that many of their likings are 
sympathetic, that is to say, mainly determined by the 
selfish desires of one another. 

The so-called selfish systems fail in that they obliterate 
the distinction, which it is desired to explain, between 
different classes of actions, by tracing them all to the 
same motive, as if additional strength were all that was 
wanted to make a tendency sanction its own persistence. 
All voluntary actions are in a sense selfish, done, that is, 
because we would on the whole rather do them than not, 
and if they were all equally selfish, and self-interest were 
the root of virtue, they would all be equally virtuous. 
Utilitarianism only escapes the reproach of sanctioning 
egotism to an extent which utilitarians themselves allow 
to be immoral, by assuming that the conduct which con- 
duces to the greatest happiness of the greatest number, 
so generally conduces to the greatest happiness of each 
individual agent, as to have become indissolubly asso- 
ciated with ideas or sentiments of approbation, which in 
the course of time have transformed themselves into moral 
judgments. This optimistic explanation of virtue by a 
pre-established harmony between its dictates and those of 
general and particular utility, which is accounted for, in 
the decadence of theology, by the beneficence of the Creator, 
might perhaps be satisfactory if the coincidence were abso- 
lute ; but reasoners of Paley's school only address them- 
I selves to common sense, and it is impossible to explain to 
; common sense what a good utilitarian God can want with 
I punishments, temporal or eternal, to make his creatures do 
as they like best ; while it is evident that there is nothing 
in a theory which rests morality on association to account 
for the belief that the association on which it rests ouglit 
to be kept up unbroken. 

The fact that men have moral sentiments, and perform 
acts dictated by a sense of moral obligation or duty, has 
thus been variously accounted for, by the fact that they 



MORALITY. 



naturally have feelings, interested or disinterested, about 
acts; and by the assumption that there is an external rule 
or standard of right, which is the source of a unique senti- 
ment enjoining conformity to itself. This rule again may 
be conceived as abstract, and lying in the nature of things, 
in which case the private conscience of the individual 
must be held to declare the law which it obeys ; or concrete, 
that is, the expression of a personal will, more or less 
directly revealed to its subjects, in which case the con- 
science is not held bound to pronounce upon the law, only 
to declare the application of the law to the cases that may 
arise. 

All these formulae no doubt contain a measure of truth, 
but they do not seem to carry us to the root of the matter. 
Our moral conceptions are too complex to be referred to a 
single ultimate instinct or propensity with a corresponding 
definite development of the organism. A number of feel- 
ings go to make up the state of consciousness which we 
call sense of duty, and many of these feelings are them- 
selves compounds of physical temperament and moral 
experience, personal as well as inherited. We are born 
with a certain number of moral feelings, inherited through 
our immediate ancestors from the long series of men and 
women who have lived under conditions favourable to their 
growth and transmission; each one of these feelings has 
a history of its own, and the children of the present day 
are born with a rudimentary disposition to say " I ought " 
in particular cases, as they are born, variously, with a 
disposition to draw or sing, kiss or quarrel, as well as 
with a disposition to walk and eat. The disposition or 
aptitude is of the most rudimentary kind, but it is not 
really more difficult to understand how experience, con- 
tinued through ages, of the constant relation between 
causes and effects should have tuned the minds of men to 
the perception of the relations, than it is to understand 
how the sensibility of the human ear to musical intervals 
has developed into a capacity for composing and retaining 



ss 



NATURAL LAW. 



long and highly elaborate melodies. Jnst as some people 
are born without a musical ear, so others are insensible to 
the force of moral considerations; but the average man 
can tell one tune from another, and is more or less shocked 
by a discord, and in like manner the average man feels 
the pressure upon his own individual will of all the un- 
known natural sequence of motive in the past which 
caused his ancestors to do on the whole more often the 
right thing than the wrong. "Ought" is what I feel 
obliged to do, because for ages and ages the stream of 
human tendency has set in favour of such doing, and my 
present inclinations have been moulded by the stream ; if 
completely, I do easily and willingly what I ought, if not, 
I may leave it undone and repent, or do it grudgingly and 
with pain, or I may set myself against the stream and 
deny the obligation ; but in the ordinary use of words, I 
am a " good " or " bad " man in proportion to the complete- 
ness and spontaneity of my obedience. 

But it is not merely true that we have for the most part, 
by inheritance and choice, a formed habit of not stealing 
or murdering, of working, if needs must, for our living, and 
of cherishing parents and children. These habits might 
be formed, as the Tartars ride and the Fijians swim, 
by inherited aptitude and acquired proficiency without 
giving room for a science of morals. The peculiarity of 
the sense of moral obligation is that the obligation felt is 
towards a precise action or abstention, while the source 
of the obligation is unknown or unfelt, and its nature 
altogether abstract ; the reasons for doing or leaving un- 
done lie not in the deed itself, but in some quality of the 
deed which makes it " right," and in some quality of our- 
selves which makes us mean by " right " what ought to 
be done. 

Still the question remains, What do we mean by " right ?" 
and what classes of action are enjoined by the moral law ? 
The just in positive law is the practical best for the com- 
munity — i.e., whatever course conduces most to the perfect 



MORALITY. 



37 



and satisfactory development of its members, in which 
ideal the greatest happiness of the greatest number is 
included. The right in morals is also the practical best for 
the individual subject to do, such bestness being estimated 
by a special feeling in the subject towards the nature of 
the act, quite apart from its consequences ; and what we 
have to do is to discover what descriptions of act inspire 
this feeling. 

If we say that it is right to do good, we do not at 
first seem to have made much progress, for the ques- 
tion, What is good ? has been as much debated and solved, 
or not solved, in as many different ways as the question 
"What is right?" But either the idea of good was 
originally less complex than that of right, or more pro- 
gress has been made towards a sound analysis of it, for 
it is a more satisfactory substitute for an answer about 
the nature of good, than those generally offered by 
moralists about the nature of right, to say that there are 
three kinds of good — viz., natural, sensible, and moral 
good. 

By natural good we mean, as will probably be allowed, 
the perfection of anything after its kind, understanding by 
such perfection only a statement or inference from experi- 
ence, that there are certain types to which beings of 
different species do actually tend to approximate, and this 
so generally that, though the perfect type may never be 
realised in one individual specimen of the class, still, every 
particular partial divergence from it appears as an excep- 
tion to the general rule. There is in this no reference to 
any metaphysical ideal, or mystical archetype, though the 
Platonic ideas, and the Aristotelian mean may be regarded 
as forms of the same conception. The natural excellence 
of the latter especially could by no means have been 
ascertained deductively; to give any significance to praises 
of the mean, we must suppose real extremities of excess 
and defect to exist and to be felt as naturally faulty ; and 
the only reason against making moderation the standard 



88 



NATURAL LAW. 



of merit is tliat excess and defect are not estimated by 
their relation to that degree of the quality in question 
which lies half-way between them — because it is half-way 
— but because it represents the normal development, in 
the direction given, of beings of a particular kind, which it 
is the aim of science to characterise more completely than 
by averages. 

Imperfection, then, is only departure from the class 
type ; a crystal may be faulty, a diamond clouded, a plant 
stunted in its growth, an animal weakly or misshapen, a 
man vicious or diseased ; but in all these cases the standard 
by which we decide the existence and the degree of imper- 
fection in a given specimen of the kind is only the kind 
itself, or what we have learnt to regard as the normal 
development of objects belonging to it. This is practically 
the point from which intuitive theories of morality start. 
They suppose the normal man to be virtuous, that vice is 
a disease of the mind or will, and they only fail to explain 
the source and nature of the peculiar disfavour and un- 
easiness to which sufferers from that particular form of 
disease are alone exposed, — why divergence from the 
class type should be felt to be "wrong" by those who 
diverge, as well as by an impartial spectator. The stoical 
morality also, admirable and fascinating in many ways as 
it is, fails altogether to account for the impression under 
which men labour, that they ought to be good of their 
kind, or live according to its nature. In fact — though such 
distinctions have a fatiguing air of subtlety — we must 
submit to see in men's natural feelings about the moral 
quality of acts a phase of their natural feeling about the 
acts themselves. The so-called instinctive condemnation 
of injustice, cruelty, or falsehood, is simply a generalisa- 
tion from the feeling excited in practice by unjust, cruel 
or faithless conduct, and the natural objection men have 
to being wronged, hurt, or deceived, is not more mysterious 
than their general preference for food over poison. 

The practical best for things in general is, of course, the 



MORALITY. 



89 



maximum possible attainment of' natural good throughout 
the system, but the feeling with which we regard " good " 
as the supreme end of desire comes from the fact that we 
give the generic name of good to all those ends of desire 
which can be permanently sought and attained without 
undesirable consequences. Things are divided by nature 
as good ; bad, or indifferent, and those ends of desire are 
called good par excellence which are naturally good all 
through and in every relation; the verbal distinction 
answers to a real distinction between classes of effects 
and the feelings which answer to these classes. The good 
qualified as "moral" or "sensible" is also an object of 
desire ; but conditionally, not absolutely, generally, not 
always. Everything that is fitted to be an object of human 
desire is good in so far as so fitted : and the objective con- 
ditions of life gives rise to many degrees and varieties of 
goodness. 

The only things which are found good always and under 
all circumstances are those which conduce to natural per- 
fection, and not merely to the natural perfection of one 
individual or class, but to the perfection of classes or indi- 
viduals in so far as their perfection harmonises with the 
perfect development of other kinds. The natural good 
or perfection of man himself consists in the possession of 
abundant faculties, active and passive, fully developed, 
and in regular and equal exercise. The condition of 
natural personal perfection may be summed up in one 
word " ability " — ability to do, feel, and perceive as much 
and as well as possible. But for perfect accomplishment, 
or the highest realisation of the possibilities of perfection, 
the ability must find due scope for appropriate exercise, 
and it depends upon other circumstances than the will 
and power of the individual to determine whether he 
shall be able to attain the highest degree, or live in the 
fullest state of natural perfection physically within his 
reach. 

We cannot pass at once from natural to moral good, but 



90 



NATURAL LAW. 



the connection "between natural good and sensible good or 
pleasure is comparatively simple. Sensible good is in- 
cluded in natural good, but is not co-extensive with it, 
and the confusion of the two, or still worse, the exaltation 
of the former as the higher, more comprehensive term, can 
only be the work of a shallow inaccurate psychology. We 
see this at once in the case of physical perfection ; strong 
and far-sighted eyes are physically better than weak ones, 
yet a short-sighted, squinting artist may derive more plea- 
sure from his imperfect powers of vision than a human 
hawk with no sense of beauty. Acute hearing is a 
perfection, though Beethoven was deaf; muscular strength 
is a perfection, though a champion pedestrian may get less 
pleasure from his iooo miles than a feeble cockney like 
Charles Lamb out of strolls measurable by the yard. 
Similarly the power of ruling men, the power of inspiring 
love, the power of inventing and creating, the power of 
seeing what is true and of being deeply moved by the 
vision, these are all natural perfections, not necessarily 
associated in practice with the keenest possible delight 
in the exercise of the acknowledged power. A small 
domestic tyrant may have more carnal satisfaction in the 
consciousness of his vexatious sway than the saviour of a 
nation in the discharge of his beneficent mission. 

Pleasure comes from the equilibrium between power 
and desire, or correspondence between the inward impulse 
to do, and the result of the thing done. But though it is 
a perfection to maintain such an equilibrium, when the 
power of achievement is ideally high, or exercised under 
ideally favourable circumstances, it is not exactly a per- 
fection to be content with powers or results that fall 
below the average, or below a distinctly conceived ideal. 
Such content sets the final seal of inferiority ; for discon- 
tent with the worse may always be — though it often is 
not — a prelude to improvement or change for the better. 

Still, pleasure, though not an infallible sign of perfec- 
tion, is undoubtedly a real element in natural good. It 



MORALITY. 



91 



would be futile to attempt to analyse the ultimate, irre- 
ducible experience to which we give the name; we all 
know what we mean by pleasure, though we find pleasure 
in the most various and opposite pursuits and sensations. 
The pleasure of the saint and of the sensualist, of the stu- 
dent and of the athlete, are alike in the one indescribable 
quality which makes the Men etre for each enjoying self. 
Most rich languages, however, distinguish between " well- 
being" and "being good;" the one phrase serves to 
describe subjective contentment, the other objective per- 
fection, and we have no more right to expect or assume the 
existence of a pre-established harmony between the two, 
than we have to assume a pre-established harmony be- 
tween the demands of the palate and the digestion. Gene- 
rally speaking, food is pleasant and the exercise of faculty 
enjoyable, but a man may get his taste from one ancestor, 
and his stomach from another, and the demands of the two 
may be incompatible ; or, again, the promptings of taste 
may be his own, a new product of the latter ages, while 
his powers of assimilation are still at the ancient level. 
It is not a paradox, but a commonplace, that the good and 
the agreeable are disparate. All naturalists will agree that 
pleasure is a natural good, and even that it has a wider 
range than other concrete goods, but it has never yet 
been found possible to develop a theory that combines 
in a consistent system the recognition of pleasure, not 
only as good, but as the true summum bonum, with the 
recognition of the unexplained, undeniable excellence of 
other spiritual ends. 

The objective conditions of pleasure are still very im- 
perfectly understood ; but so far as we are aware, it seems 
always to be attendant upon the free and normal exercise 
of some natural faculty, and pain, upon the disturbance or 
arrest of such exercise. It is not, of course, true that 
every natural act is distinctly pleasurable, nor that every 
pleasure attends an act conducive to the natural good of 
the organism as a whole ; but in general, allowing for the 



92 



NATURAL LAV/. 



complexity of organisation, which may make the simultane- 
ous exercise of disparate faculties difficult or impossible, it 
is true that pleasure attends upon, or, perhaps, is actually 
the sensation of, a normal activity of the natural powers ; 
pain, of abnormal or impeded activity. Why some normal 
actions are attended with pleasure, while others are per- 
formed unconsciously, with automatic regularity, and what 
is the difference between the two classes, are points that 
physiologists will doubtless in time determine. Mean- 
while, it may be conjectured with some plausibility that 
pleasure accompanies the exercise of natural powers, or 
special organs, at a certain period in their evolutionary 
history. Animals that only breathe and digest may be 
supposed to find something dimly pleasurable, or analogous 
to pleasure, in the consciousness of those processes, which 
in more highly organised animals are not conscious at all 
so long as they go on with normal regularity. We know 
that ordinary human pleasures of a semi-artificial kind 
are apt to lose their zest after constant indulgence and 
repetition, and analogy would favour the supposition that 
powers which are in constant necessary exercise would at 
length come to be exercised with indifference, if not with 
absolute insensibility. There is nothing in this supposi- 
tion at variance with the most general conclusion given 
by Professor Bain, 1 that " states of pleasure are connected 
with an increase, and states of pain with an abatement, 
of some or all of the vital functions ; " for " increase " and 
" abatement " are terms of comparison, and the vital func- 
tions which we suppose to become indifferent and uncon- 
scious are only those of which the variations are imper- 
ceptible; since every act of consciousness implies some 
organic modification or change in its subject, the absence 
of change, either in the intensity or in the mode of exer- 
cising vital functions in constant operation, almost implies 
the absence of sensibility, pleasurable or the reverse. 
Pleasure, on this hypothesis, would be attendant on the 

1 The Senses and the Intellect, p. 286. 



MORALITY. 



93 



exercise either of comparatively newly-acquired faculties, 
or of faculties that only come into play occasionally, or 
intermittently. 

Supposing this to be correct, sensible good, though 
always the same in reference to the conscious subject, i.e., 
always some kind of pleasure, varies in its objective con- 
ditions or constitution with any variation of the specific 
type which is the standard of natural good. If we accept 
the doctrine of evolution in its general bearings, we may 
suppose, as it were, a belt of pleasurable consciousness of 
power, bounded at one extremity by the high-water mark 
of actual development, and not necessarily increasing in 
width as that gradually rises to a fresh level in the scale 
of creation. We can no more suppose sensible pleasures 
to be habitually associated with acts destructive to the 
sentient organism, than we could suppose societies natu- 
rally to institute laws destructive of all society ; for we 
know that the pleasurableness of an act is a strong motive 
for its performance, that would in practice certainly over- 
rule any abstract desire for the continuance of the species 
in its purity. 

Utilitarianism rests morality upon the coincidence, 
which is certainly general, between natural and sensible 
good, and the conditions of their common realisation. It 
makes moral good practically a compound of the pleasure 
naturally desired, and the perfection naturally admired or 
preferred ; and it only breaks down when we try to apply 
its test to the cases which are unfortunately also of very 
general occurrence, in which pleasure and virtue lie along 
divergent paths. Virtue, by which we understand the 
deliberate pursuit of perfection, is only valuable on utili- 
tarian principles for the pleasure which it gives, so that, 
on these principles, if it ceases to give pleasure, or gives 
less pleasure than something which is not virtue, it ceases 
to be valuable or good. 1 But, of two things one ; either 
this never occurs, in which case it is inexplicable that 
we should have two names for the natural appetites of 

1 See Addenda E., page 367. 



94 



NATURAL LAW. 



man alone, out of all the animals that spontaneously seek 
the gratification of their natural wants : or else, when it 
occurs it is right, or at least not wrong, to prefer the 
sensible pleasure to the natural good. In other words, 
the theory has to choose between a somewhat extravagant 
optimism, and what, without any appeal to vulgar pre- 
judice, must be called a comparative laxity of moral 
precepts. Children are told that to be good is the way 
to be happy, and it would be strange that they should 
always decline to accept the comfortable doctrine if the 
sequence were really so simple and direct. But, if happi- 
ness were attainable, and the highest wisdom and virtue 
consisted in attaining as much happiness as possible, the 
notion of morality would either disappear with the feeling 
of constraint that is a part of it, and only arises when the 
natural pursuit of pleasure is interrupted ; or it would be 
reduced, as it practically is by Bentham, to the art of 
being happy under difficulties. Mark Tapley may be as 
sound a philosopher as the Emperor Marcus Aurelius ; but 
we do not believe that he, or any other follower of Ben- 
tham, ever felt obliged in conscience to be happier than a 
spontaneous inclination — which is not duty — made him. 

In one sense, the existence of these two forms of con- 
sciousness (obligation and pleasure) is explained when the 
history of their growth and origin has been traced; but 
why, when they are developed, each is what it is and not 
something quite different — or, indeed, nothing at all — is a 
question with which positive thinkers may decline to em- 
barrass themselves. It is unphilosophical to ask for the 
logical reason of matters of fact, as well as unscientific to 
ignore the reinforcement of certitude belonging to matters 
of fact so universal as to have become a premise for the 
reason. The mental state which we call enjoyment is not 
the result of physically simple causes; we have not a 
special organ for feeling happy, but we have a special 
mental feeling which attends upon analogous states of 
special organs. Similarly, we have not a special organ for 



MORALITY. 



95 



the apprehension of what is right, but we have a special 
mental feeling towards analogous lines of conduct ; and we 
shall scarcely be able to get nearer to an explanation of 
the feeling than an analysis of those qualities of conduct 
which seem to be its sine qua non. 

For practical purposes, the utilitarian and the Perfec- 
tionist theories of morality agree on all points except in 
their estimate of the comparative power of pleasure as a 
motive. If there is one psychological truth of axiomatic 
evidence, it is that people find it pleasant to do as they 
like, or rather, their liking and the pleasantness of the 
action are correlative — two aspects of a natural agreement 
between the agent and the act. Something has already 
been said of the character of those acts which are naturally 
pleasant, and, subject to correction, we assume them to be 
those in which the less hackneyed powers of the organism 
find their appropriate exercise. An act is found pleasur- 
able in proportion to its essential naturalness, i.e., to its 
fitness for exercising existing organs of action and impres- 
sibility in a healthy manner. But such exercise may lead 
to diminished as well as to heightened sensibility, for, 
although a faculty is strengthened by its exercise in tak- 
ing in different, numerically distinct impressions, the same 
subjective feeling is apt to grow faint with repetition, and 
may in time cease to be distinguished in consciousness at 
all. A pleasurable act, when (in the lapse of ages) it has 
been repeated often enough for its periodical repetition to 
have become, as it were, an organic function, continues to 
be performed, if possible, with more inevitable regularity 
than if it were voluntary, but with less and less sense of 
pleasure, until, finally, its performance is a matter of indif- 
ference to sense, but has become a part of the natural life 
of the organism, and its unimpeded performance an ele- 
ment in the natural good of the species. 

Will is conscious tendency, and as there are states of con- 
sciousness unattended by pleasure or pain, desire is distin- 
guished as the will to follow a tendency which produces 



9 5 



NATURAL LAW. 



pleasure. Now it is possible that the hope or imagination 
of the greatest possible pleasure may be irresistible, when it 
exists, and it is further true that so many of our acts have 
the hope of pleasure or the fear of pain for their motive, 
that we readily assume these motives to be universal, to 
lie latent in consciousness, when we fail to be aware of 
them. Without this assumption, utilitarianism crumbles to 
the ground ; for a formula is useless which leaves the inter- 
mediate bulk of indifferent actions unaccounted for, besides 
stumbling over the extremes of infelicific self-indulgence 
or self-devotion. It is inaccurate to speak of motives ex- 
cept in relation to consciousness, and not all acts of will 
are preceded by conscious self-determination. Men will 
and choose consciously, sometimes moved by a physical 
impulse, sometimes by a present physical inducement, some- 
times by a mental representation of inducements, real 
or imaginary ; but consciousness includes only a part, not 
the whole, of the organic life of man, and it cannot be too 
clearly understood that the higher forms of consciousness 
are not the cause but the product of lower processes of 
animal life. 

It is conceivable that a universe might be so providen- 
tially arranged that every natural tendency should be 
normally felicific, and no natural tendency impeded in its 
course. But this is not the case in the world we live in. 
Many natural tendencies give little or no pleasure to the 
subject of them. Many of them if freely followed would 
become productive of pain either to the individual or to 
other conscious subjects ; and this fact, conjoined with the 
influences of the natural human affections in developing a 
sympathetic concern in man for man, hampers the will as 
well as the conduct, and it is found not merely physically 
impossible to do all that we wish, but morally impossible 
to will to do all that we wish to will. The notion of a 
natural impulse, persisted in in defiance of external 
obstacles, and passing into consciousness in a form slightly 
modified by the opposition it has encountered, brings us 



MORALITY. 



97 



some way towards a conception of moral necessity that 
shall not err on the side of optimism, and that recognises 
no duties of imperfect obligation, except as the correlative 
of imperfect knowledge or undeveloped sensibility. 

All the vital force of a man's individual nature tends 
spontaneously to self-development, he feels impelled to be 
himself, as fine a specimen of humanity as he can, to realise, 
that is to say, all the capabilities of action and passion that 
are in him, so far as fortune, favourable or adverse, will allow. 
The appetite for happiness may be strong or weak, but as 
pleasure is found only in the gratification of secondary, 
special appetites, it is obvious that a man's chance of gra- 
tifying a general taste for gratification depends upon a 
thousand circumstances besides the mere strength of his 
wish, though that alone is a circumstance that may now 
and then have power to turn the scale. But if a man's 
strongest tendency is to be — rather than to please — himself, 
his nature will still struggle to assert itself through every 
check, though it will be compelled to many compromises. 

To take real cases : a young man aims at self-culture, 
but he may only be able to secure leisure for intellectual 
pursuits at the expense of the not less necessary discipline 
of practical life ; he may resolve to whet his intellect upon 
the grindstone of a bread-winning industry, or he may 
hope to train his imagination to supply the place of expe- 
rience ; but, in either case, he has to resolve, with more or 
less painful effort, to be his best self under difficulties — 
upon spiritual short-commons. The same necessity may 
be forced upon an individual by single accidents, the 
will of another, or the merest chance, a birth, a death, loss 
of fortune or loss of health, or the contre-coup of some 
change in the circumstances of others, involving the mate- 
rial interests of their connexions. Many words, indeed, 
are hardly needed to establish the simple position that even 
when a man knows what life he is best fitted for, and wishes 
to lead it in the best manner possible, he may not be able 
to do so without sacrificing some of the pleasure or some 

G 



9 8 



NATURAL LAW. 



of the efficiency which would be his but for adverse 
circumstances. 

Now, it is possible to define virtue, or moral good, as the 
consciousness of a necessary (or actually existing) tendency, 
of which the conditions are fixed and stable, towards the 
natural good of the individual, as conditioned by the com- 
mon life of the species, in all those cases when submission 
to the tendency is neither pleasurable nor automatic. All 
unimpeded tendencies we suppose to be one or the other, 
and we do not expect to find the discharge of the functions 
of natural life or the pursuit of natural pleasures attended 
by the peculiar sense of constraint which we call moral 
obligation. The actions that are so attended are of various 
kinds. The greater part of the waking life of men is taken 
up with conscious, more or less voluntary, actions, that is 
to say, co-ordinated volitions directed towards the attain- 
ment of ends thought or felt to be desirable. Those ends 
which constitute the natural good of man as a rational 
animal are not absolutely fixed, but at any given time 
they may be inferred in the same way as we determine 
what constitutes the perfection of a greyhound or a bull- 
dog, by an intelligent eclecticism preferring out of all the 
rudimentary possibilities existing in nature, the combina- 
tion that harmonises the greatest number of the strongest 
tendencies. A world so ordered that none of the real ten- 
dencies of which individuals were conscious ever came into 
collision or conflict with other tendencies of the same or 
other individuals, would be perfect after its kind. If the 
world had been so arranged that it was always easy to 
know and pleasant to do what is right, we should not 
perhaps regret, what we should no longer have or need, the 
conception of right. 

Theologians have found comfort in the thought that the 
evil in the world might be, as it certainly is, a necessary 
condition for the moral education of mankind ; we cannot 
know moral good without knowing natural and sensible 
evil ; but it is by no means evident that the knowledge of 



MORALITY. 



99 



moral good is a good in itself ; it can only be so regarded 
in the metaphysical sense in which the Stoics made an end 
of conformity to nature. The knowledge of moral good is 
not a sensible good, it is not even a simple natural good, 
it only becomes so conditionally upon other things being 
as they are, that is to say, the world imperfect. We have 
the conception of right or moral perfection because the 
world is imperfect, and this conception is the condition of 
its perfectibility, if indeed it be perfectible ; by which we 
mean that in the strength of this conception, man, the con- 
scious register of the least material tendencies of nature, 
may continue to approach more nearly to the goal of a per- 
fection that still recedes, but least dishearteningly from 
those who know the laws of mental perspective by which a 
goal ceases to attract those who have reached or passed it- 
. To be more precise ; we conceive moral good as the 
pursuit of natural (not sensible) good under difficulties 
without which the pursuit would not be self-conscious. 
These difficulties may be of three kinds. The mate- 
rial obstacles which external nature (including human 
society) may and does oppose to the natural tendency of 
each single man towards the realisation of as much perfec- 
tion after his kind as his particular organisation is capable 
of attaining ; the less palpable, but more insuperable ob' 
stacles which certain tendencies of an organism that is not 
perfect after its kind, oppose to the full and normal action 
of other tendencies, the frustration of which constitutes 
imperfection in any specimen of the kind ; and, lastly, a 
difficulty which Utilitarian morality seems incapable of 
meeting or including in a consistent system of precepts ; 
that namely which is presented by the facts of evolution 
— the instability of the type to which it is perfection to 
conform. 

Mr. Herbert Spencer observes that "survival of the, 
fittest cannot bring the inclinations and aversions into 
harmony with unfelt conditions/' and it is at least equally 
clear that the inclinations and aversions have no power by 



IOO 



NATURAL LAW. 



themselves to bring about their own extinction ; the desire 
for one action that is at present pleasurable does not dis- 
pose to another action that, at a future time, might be 
pleasurable, nor to the same action in the event of its 
ceasing to be pleasurable. Evolution is not primarily a 
Utilitarian process, even though, as has been suggested, 
pleasure were only to be met with as an accompaniment 
to the exercise of faculties still engaged in the act of 
evolving themselves ; for the process, while appearing as a 
condition of pleasure in general, sets a fatal term to the 
enjoyment of each real pleasure severally. The natural 
good of any species may vary indefinitely, with whatever 
modifications of the specific type actually take place, but 
as there always is a type, the standard of natural good is 
at least relatively fixed. Sensible pleasure, again, may be 
conceived as fixed in relation to the conscious subject, or 
individual member of the class, the type of which is sup- 
posed to vary, but such variation necessarily brings with 
it a partial disturbance of the agreement between natural 
and sensible good. The physical interests of man are the 
same as those of other animals, that is to say, self-preser- 
vation, and, perhaps, though less directly, the preservation 
of the species ; but the interests peculiar to him as rational 
are relative, dependent that is upon the point of develop- 
ment reached by the active impulses at any given period in 
the history of the species, without reference to considera- 
tions of utility or pleasure. Men wish for this or that, not 
because they can get it, but because their antecedents have 
determined them to wish ; and if morality consisted in the 
systematic pursuit of pleasure, or the indulgence of wish, 
it would be felt as a moral duty to resist the course of 
evolution whenever it promised to give birth to new 
wishes, unless, which is hardly ever the case, means of in- 
dulging the wish were provided first. But, as has been 
said before, whatever other duties men may acknowledge, 
they do not look upon it as a duty to preserve the species 
in statu qirt. 



MORALITY. 



101 



There is no common measure of happiness to enable us 
to say that the more perfect being enjoys more of it than 
the less. An animal can only be happy with all the 
powers of its being, and if an animal has the chance of 
being happy after its kind, what inducement has it to be- 
come a different animal if it can only be happy at best ? 
In point of fact, no man is either as happy or as virtuous 
as he would like, but the feeling towards those two kinds 
of defect is quite different ; one is spontaneously named a 
misfortune, the other a fault. The one makes the universe 
so far the less cheerful, the other makes it the worse, in 
the technical sense which it is our business to analyse. 
For that badness which is the converse of the good we can 
still find no other paraphrase than imperfection, or depar- 
ture from the type of specific excellence. Thus, though it 
is not in itself a crime to be unfortunate, it is a defect to 
fail in making use of average opportunities for securing 
success ; and though it is not a crime to be made melan- 
choly by misfortune, we reckon as a defect the morbid 
mood which finds no satisfaction in circumstances of ave- 
rage felicity. 

Utilitarianism might pass muster in a theory of Social 
Statics, but it breaks down altogether if we seek its help 
to construct a theory of Social Dynamics. Happiness is 
relative to the desires of the organism as it is, and we 
want a clue by which to make or keep desires what they 
should be, through all the changes brought about in their 
nature or chance of indulgence. A change in the environ- 
ment may alter the means by which a desired happiness 
has to be attained, or may make it unattainable by any 
means within the power of the organism as hitherto con- 
stituted. Such a change may either cause the old desire 
to atrophy for want of indulgence, or it may stimulate new 
energy to overcome the obstacles in the way of indulgence ; 
and this new development of energy may be attended by 
a change of taste which may supersede the desire that 
provoked the change. In other words, whenever the cir- 



102 



NATURAL LAW. 



cumstances of men change for the worse, without their 
own co-operation, the strength of existing desires resists 
the threatened privation, and unless the change affects the 
powers as well as the enjoyments of the unlucky genera- 
tion, it defends itself by a real progress, the development 
of new ability to cope with circumstances. 

The migration of a progressive race from a region of ex- 
treme to one of moderate fertility is an obvious example 
of this kind of influence, but by far the commonest kind of 
change brought about in the circumstances of men is that 
effected by the course of history, which leaves each new 
generation burdened with the debts and legacies of its pre- 
decessors. For nations, as for men, successive experiences 
modify the character, or the sum-total of impulses, abili- 
ties, and inclinations which determine the action at any 
given moment. The desires of the child are not those of 
the youth, but the desires of the man are after all an inhe- 
ritance from the past that he calls his. The successors of 
an age of constructive faith possess by inheritance a taste 
for the pleasures of performance, as well as, very often, an 
acquired knowledge of the futility of special kinds of per- 
formance. It is in such straits that the counsels of Utili- 
tarianism might fairly be called " unprincipled " — not by 
way of reproach, but as a simple statement of their intel- 
lectual looseness. To take the present time — which is 
variously called an age of scepticism, analytic, critical, 
indifferentist, and so forth — if we ask how the members of 
such a generation can attain the greatest possible happi- 
ness, some will say by being less critical of the advantages 
they enjoy, others by being less indifferent to the success 
of the work they might do, but there is nothing in the 
greatest happiness principle to enable men to decide whe- 
ther they shall aim at attaining, say, the same amount of 
happiness, by limiting their wants or by enlarging their 
labours ; if content is the only thing to be aimed at, and 
clods are less discontented than critics, it should be a duty 
—not a pardonable weakness, but a positive duty — to culti- 



MORALITY. 103 

vate cloddishness, and this no one seriously believes, 
though many half admit the premises which can only lead 
to inferences of kindred absurdity. 

The issue is not altogether between conservative plea- 
sure and painful progress, but if progress is conceived as 
the winding road that leads up the heights of perfection, 
happiness may answer to the resting-place at every turn of 
the zig-zag ; listless climbers hurried away from one seat 
by cosmic or historic force have no higher ambition than 
to reach the next turn and rest again in thankfulness, and 
it is nothing to these whether they rest at a higher or a 
lower level, so they do but rest. The theory of the perfec- 
tionist on the other hand is, that man has nothing better 
to do with himself than climb, and the proof alleged is 
that the higher he climbs up this allegorical hill, the more 
of a man he becomes ; he breathes quicker, he sees further, 
he climbs faster, his ability is greater, even though he 
should now and then forget, for a stage, to rest, or spend the 
inevitable breathing space in impatient longings to be gone. 

To each individual unit, no doubt, it is an urgent ques- 
tion, What is the greatest happiness possible to me ? but 
science, even ethical science, is essentially unsympathetic, 
and speaking scientifically, the self-contained happiness 
of a human unit is of no more account than the blossoming 
of a flower or the breaking of a wave ; it was and is not, 
it came and went, and the rest of the world felt no change. 
Human feeling is a kind of waste-pipe of the world's force, 
and all the motive power that spends itself in unproduc- 
tive feeling counts for nothing in the history of progress, 
save in so far as the experience modifies the subject self. 
It is not of great moment whether each individual soul- 
chimney enjoys the flavour of the smoke it is engaged in 
consuming, but intense and varied feeling is a product and 
a symptom of rich and active life, or, in other words, of 
human perfection, and it is an imperfection in the objec- 
tive universe if fine and normal feeling habitually suffers 
pain and privation. 



104 



NATURAL LAW. 



It may, perhaps, be objected that we seem to put for- 
ward two standards of excellence, the perfection of the 
type as it is, and an ideal standard of perfection in the 
absolute abundance and variety of vital power ; and this 
is true, but not necessarily inconsistent. The common 
quality of all ideals is to be as full as they can, and each 
special ideal only has its possibilities determined by con- 
ditions of time, place, and circumstance. The power of 
growing or developing is a natural excellence, because we 
look upon everything as naturally, so to speak physi- 
cally, the better, the more of a thing it is : if a vegetable 
throws up a long leafy stalk at the expense of its root or 
blossom we do not praise it, but the more flowers or 
fruit it can succeed in bearing from the one stock, the 
better every gardener and grammarian must call it. And 
when organisms of a still higher kind include among their 
specific qualities a power of self-adaptation and self-de- 
velopment, the more of this power there is in each indi- 
vidual the better specimen of his kind he will be, always 
provided that the performance of the day is not sacrificed 
to the promise of the morrow. 

The highest form of virtue or moral excellence, accord- 
ing to this view, would lie in the conscious tendency to- 
wards conformity to the type as it is going to be, but as, 
except in a few chosen specimens, it is not yet discernible 
to be. Experience, which gives no support to the view 
that men feel a moral obligation to preserve the ideal of 
their own generation unchanged, certainly warrants our 
assumption that it is from a sense of moral duty or con- 
straint that some few men in most ages exhaust themselves 
in endeavouring to raise the ideal of their contemporaries. 
The natural action which has become easy, and not yet 
too familiar, is pleasurable ; the natural action which is 
good, but has not yet become easy enough to be plea- 
surable, is virtuous. Virtue accordingly is not pleasure, 
nor a condition of present pleasure ; it is the condition of 
good, which includes pleasure to distant generations — as 



MORALITY. 



pleasure may be the precursor of indifference. Without 
evolution, virtuous action would, with habit, merge into 
sensible pleasure, and vanish at last in unconscious natu- 
ral good ; and it is owing to the slow instability of an 
imperfect world that virtue remains, while what is vir- 
tuous changes, as some think all too slowly. Perhaps 
the most conclusive proof that morality consists in con- 
sciousness of constraint, not in any inherent property of 
moral acts, is that persons in whom the inability not to do 
a given moral act has become absolute, are absolutely 
incapable of recognising their own action as virtuous. 
There are some trifling acts commonly classed as virtuous 
which every one feels that there is no merit in perform- 
ing, though their omission is still felt to be wrong because 
their performance, though easy, has not become absolutely 
automatic. There are ages when no more virtue is com- 
monly practised than has become comparatively easy and 
natural, and at such times optimism flourishes, because 
morality is stationary. Morality advances when the sense 
of moral obligation is onerous and distressing, because the 
necessity then experienced by the moral teachers of the 
race is made by desires going forward after the unattained, 
not by motives already present to sense. 

We are not yet prepared to describe in detail the kinds 
of action or forbearance to which men feel morally com- 
pelled ; but moral conduct may be defined in general as 
conduct conducive to the natural good or perfection of the 
agent and those persons affected by his action, and the 
one morally right and dutiful way of adding to the happi- 
ness, which is a part of the natural good of sentient beings, 
is by ministering to their perfection, and removing objec- 
tive obstacles in the way of their sane and profitable 
enjoyments. The moral sense is a naturally conditioned 
appetite for natural perfection, especially of certain kinds, 
the natural (superable) impediments to which virtually 
trace the outlines of special duties, social and self-regard- 
ing. 



io6 



NATURAL LAW. 



It will, however, not impossibly, be objected, on the one 
hand, that virtue is degraded by being ranked as a simple 
natural phenomenon, like hunger or sight ; and, on the 
other, that virtue, if shorn of all her supernatural dignity 
and beauty, will lose her power to control the very beings 
whom we are supposing to be subject, by a natural neces- 
sity, to her sway. As the purpose of these pages is trutb, 
not edification—when were men ever made virtuous by 
argument? — it is perhaps unnecessary to do more than 
allude to these probable objections; nevertheless, they 
will be met to some extent when we come to consider the 
particular provisions of the moral law as conceived from 
the natural, realistic standing-point. At present we are 
only concerned to show that a moral law of some kind, 
that is to say, a rule of conduct of strictly subjective 
necessity, is not only possible, but really laid down for 
every rational being by its own nature, the free develop- 
ment of which is conditioned by the equally natural, fixed 
order of the universe ; that this law, as it owes its force to 
the consent of the subject, is only binding upon the indi- 
vidual conscience, which is subject and legislator in one; 
and that this law thus promulgated in every conscience 
will be the same for all men, in so far as they have a com- 
mon nature, and an identical knowledge of the wider laws 
to which all existence, their own included, is in common 
subjection. 

The force of this law is not derived from the incidents 
which bring its existence home to the consciousness of 
men ; but after they have attained to a sense of the reality 
of the laws actually followed by themselves, they can trace 
the historical course of their own enthralment without 
incurring any risk of emancipation. There are some lines 
of conduct which we feel naturally bound to follow : these 
lines are such as have been naturally selected for approval, 
as most conducive to the perfection of all those concerned : 
if we try to imagine any other general rule of conduct for 
ourselves than the one so selected, we are brought into 



MORALITY. 



107 



collision with the spontaneous judgment of our fellows 
that this pseudo-rule is bad or indifferent ; and there is 
no conceivable bad or indifferent rule which we ourselves 
could approve if proposed for his own guidance by some- 
body else. Our feeling is that other people " ought " to 
be good — good in themselves, and good to us — but we do 
not, except by a transparent fallacy of egotism, make the 
goodness of others consist in their willingness to indulge 
ourselves in pleasures that are not good. The self and the 
community agree because both seek a general rule for the 
right guidance of the other, and general rules refuse to 
admit of one-sided application. But the real reason of 
our subjection to a moral law is not the opinion of others 
that we ought to submit to special rules, but our own 
habits of feeling — habits formed, however, under the same 
objective conditions as the opinion with which they agree. 

As has been said, no truth regarding human nature is 
more general, or more generally admitted, than the fact 
that men find it pleasant to do as they like ; but there is 
another point upon which the experience of ages is no less 
unanimous, and herein it is that we conceive the first 
foundation of morality to be laid : the condition of being 
able to do as they like is practically unattainable by mortal 
men. Pleasure consists in the complete and appropriate 
satisfaction of each of our faculties or appetites. Happi- 
ness would consist in the full and simultaneous satisfac- 
tion of all the powers and desires of our nature, if such 
satisfaction were not a moral and material impossibility. 
Man is imperfect ; he has unsatisfied instincts, or rather 
he has the instinct of dissatisfaction, which omnipotence 
itself would find it hard to satisfy. His best pleasures lie 
in the exercise of faculties which have to develop before 
he can use them, while he can conceive and desire the 
pleasure which their exercise will afford before their 
development is complete — which, indeed, it never is, any 
more than the bee's cell is a perfect hexagon, or the eye a 
faultless optical instrument. The foundation of morality, 



ro8 



NATURAL LAW. 



or the sense of constraint acting in favour of human ten- 
dencies towards perfection, is not, of course, to be found 
in man's imperfection, as such, but rather in the juxta- 
position of his higher impulses with material and spiritual 
checks to the impulses. If man were morally perfect, the 
imperfections of the world and the flesh would be power- 
less to cause a moral struggle ; if the world were mate- 
rially perfect, the devil himself would have no temptations 
wherewithal to seduce the weakest sinner. If men always 
liked what was best they would do it without feelings of 
constraint ; if what they liked always was best they would 
have no feelings of approval or aspiration apart from 
liking; but both the feeling of compulsion and the re- 
solved submission to its force are facts of consciousness. 
Moral perfection is the deliberate pursuit of the elected 
Best, through every obstacle within and without ; and the 
objective abundance of obstacles to which we owe the 
conception, by contrast, of a moral Best, also brings home 
to our experience the reality of a moral Bad. Man is the 
imperfect denizen of an imperfect world, and therefore, 
though morality may be as natural as hunger and as 
necessary as food, crime is as possible as starvation and 
malice as real as indigestion. But the existence of moral 
evil is only an historical fact, that of moral good is a logi- 
cal necessity as eternal as pain and privation. 

Children and adults with undeveloped faculties often 
have their min ds occupied for a time with a single, not 
impracticable, desire, the gratification of which constitutes 
their idea of happiness ; but the world is not so planned, 
or the laws of nature so adjusted, as to give every child 
the sugar-plum or the toy which excites its appetite as 
soon as it begins to cry for them ; and this is the beginning, 
though as yet only the beginning, of the moral experi- 
ence of the race. The toy and the sugar-plum are some- 
times enjoyed, as well as often necessarily renounced, and 
with the natural man the wish is father to the thought that 
enjoyment is the natural rule, and deprivation the excep- 



MORALITY, 



109 



tion, an accident to be cried out at, or prayed against, or 
warded off with such, small prudence as a limited experi- 
ence may suggest. But natural necessity is inexorable in 
its alternatives. The desired enjoyment has either to be 
gone without or purchased for a price, and the evolution 
of moral principles takes place pari passu with the growth 
of general feelings as to the price worth paying for each 
indulgence as it offers. Ethical science sums up the 
empirical estimates of the comparative value of various 
natural goods, and shows them to be in accordance with 
a perfectly natural and intelligible standard — the supreme 
natural good of general perfection. All our permanent 
preferences are for things permanently and constitutionally 
good, good in themselves all through and in every relation, 
and to these we naturally think it " right " or practically 
best that passing partial goods should be systematically 
sacrificed. One after another the simpler, cruder, pleasures 
of the child or the savage are found to be hardly worth 
their natural price; they have to be worked or prayed 
for too hard, competed for too fiercely for the trifling 
reward to be worth the cost, and reason advises voluntary 
renunciation or quelling of desire in special cases long 
before the suit and service of perfection comes to be pre- 
scribed as the whole and sole duty of mankind. 

But even then a fresh difficulty may arise; the taste 
for sugar-plums is outgrown, and men become curious in 
toys. The problem to do as one likes is complicated by 
uncertainty as to what on the whole one does like best. 
Physical necessity introduces us to moral necessity by 
bringing our appetites into collision with dispassionate 
forces as ultimate and irreducible, and far more powerful 
than themselves. The question then perforce arises with 
respect to any course of conduct, not merely whether 
we might have liked it if circumstances had left it alto- 
gether easy and attractive, but whether we can and do ; 
whether we are content to like it ; whether our judgment 
goes with our, taste; or, whether its native pleasurableness 



no 



NATURAL LAW. 



is disturbed by half-a-dozen conflicting and irreconcilable 
wishes; for, if so, just because tastes are ultimate and 
above reason, it is vain to try to restore the lost appetite. 
Eeason by itself is not a motive for action, only real facts 
and desires, and the compromise between reality and 
desire, which reason recognises to be necessary and im- 
poses even on the reluctant will, is what we call moral 
duty, that which ought to be done. Till the need for the 
compromise is felt, and the formula for it accepted, the 
mind continues a prey to incompatible desires; no one 
pleasure draws it with the old irresistible force; one 
appetite has lost its edge with indulgence, another with 
disuse, and over and above the limitations which the 
capacities of our body and mind set to the pleasures they 
can enjoy, there is still the whole indifferent machinery of 
worldly circumstance, which now helps, now hinders our 
endeavour, but certainly makes it impossible for us always 
to have our will unless we can learn to let our will accom- 
modate itself to the necessary limits of material possi- 
bility. 

The discovery that easy, unbroken happiness for the 
mass of men is not amongst the results of existing natural 
laws is an indispensable step in the evolution of morality ; 
but the search after happiness — which is only the pleasur- 
able consciousness of natural good— is still natural even 
when it is found that the pursuit has to be carried on 
under difficulties. The cUfhculties only stimulate fresh 
faculties to assist in the search, and knowledge was, per- 
haps, first valued as an auxiliary to pleasure. But as 
every faculty that is exercised tends to assert its own 
activity as an end in itself, the impulse to know continues 
active even after knowledge has begun to disclose un- 
pleasant truths. To seek knowledge is not the same 
thing as to seek pleasure, and to find the knowledge 
that pleasure cannot be found is not a pain, if it was 
really knowledge and not pleasure that was sought. We 
need not borrow the eloquent arguments which have gone 



MORALITY. 



in 



to prove tha& life is an unmitigated evil; it is enough for 
our purpose that all agree in allowing it to be by no means 
an unmitigated good. It is not within our power to secure 
a constant succession of the natural innocent pleasures 
proper to our organisation. In some races of men this 
fact leads to the development of what we call higher 
faculties and aspirations after nobler pleasures than those 
of sense, and then the old conception of happiness, which 
perhaps might have been realised by the help of the newly- 
acquired knowledge and experience, is found to have lost 
the power of satisfying the civilised or sophisticated taste. 
Still the hope of happiness is not at once relinquished; 
the higher, purer pleasures of art, intellect, and human 
sympathy may yet, it is thought, give content. But the 
experience of the nursery repeats itself in the schoolroom; 
disappointment without, disenchantment within, remind 
the poet, the scholar, the lover, that the world is not 
made for man, nor man for happiness. Men not only 
want pleasures they cannot have, they want ampler, more 
unwearied powers of enjoying the pleasures that are theirs; 
and these inward and outward limitations, like all the 
other fixed conditions of life, modify the human rule of 
right, or the practical best for men. 

Human nature, however, has one last protest to make 
before the gospel of renunciation is accepted with all its 
inevitable moral corollaries. As Utilitarians when hard 
pressed will talk about the pleasures of virtue, Eudsemonists 
turn with well- affected indifference from the thought of 
vulgar enjoyment to the praise and worship of the ideal. 
To live for art, for science, or for self-culture, that is, to 
create beauty, to discover truth, to cherish and strengthen 
the power of descrying every present beauty, of appre- 
hending every latent truth, may well seem enough to 
occupy our pitiful powers, to satisfy our greediest cravings 
through the short span of a human life. Such an ideal 
is better than pleasant, and the hope of approaching more 
and more nearly to its perfect attainment may well carry 



112 



NATURAL LAW. 



its votaries through the seasons of physical exhaustion 
and mental langour which await the strenuous artist, the 
persevering amateur. But one thing is wanting to the 
ideal life of aesthetic contemplation and intellectual per- 
ception, and this one thing is Necessity. The lovers of 
art, who are not as a rule famed for their science, count 
it a praise that no moral sanction compels men to lead 
their life. The elect will do so; the many are but as 
swine before whom no pearls are to be cast. And yet it 
is a flaw in this, — the finest conception of human excel- 
lence which has been reached by the consideration of 
man's nature alone, out of relation to the universe, of which 
the whole human race is but a dependent fraction, — that 
the mass of mankind cannot share it, and that it does, as 
a fact, lose its hold even upon some of those who have felt 
its charm, when experience shows that a life spent in 
pursuit of the ideal is not itself ideal, but penetrated 
with a thousand human, arbitrary, accidental imperfections. 
Why, we ask, and ask in vain, should we toil to keep our 
minds open and our senses clear to receive the impressions 
of perfect truth and perfect beauty, when we know that so 
far from finding them we shall learn to bear the frequent 
pain of failure in their quest at the cost of apathy to rare 
success ? We call it duty when the will is bent to any 
action by other considerations than spontaneous natural 
desire, and the will of man is not habitually bent, or con- 
sciously self-compelled, towards a life of mere receptivity 
or self-contained power — however various — of passive 
perception. This is especially true of the present day, 
when there is no living national art unconsciously edu- 
cating the tastes of individuals to healthy enjoyment of 
contemporary production, for when the Hedonist and the 
world are, so to speak, tete-a-tete, if the former wearies in 
his task of well-feeling, there is no power behind to secure 
his constancy, all his excellences are unconditioned, which 
to us means accidental, and at the mercy of accident. 
Action is a process, the tendency towards which may be 



MORALITY. 



ii3 



conscious, and consciously dictated "by a rational anticipa- 
tion of ends ; but feeling or passion is a state to which the 
transition from other states is inevitably unconscious ; and 
though one passion may succeed another in a more or less 
constant order, they have no vital productive force, and 
their duration or pleasurableness is at the mercy of what- 
ever contingent influences may be brought to bear upon 
them from without. The impossibility of calling up at 
will the mental affections which have been found pleasur- 
able in the past, is reason enough by itself why it should 
not be felt as a duty to revive either the affection or the 
pleasure • but, because they cannot be revived at will, the 
happiness of those who follow art for its moments of rapt 
delight is but insecurely placed. 

The despair which follows upon discoveries of this kind 
is apt to solace itself with irreligious complaints. Young 
poets suffering from that combination of their own private 
passions with sympathy for the wrongs of the universe 
at large, which goes to form the disease called Welt- 
schmerz, are apt to acknowledge a God that they may have 
somewhat to curse and wherewithal to blaspheme. But 
if we assume, as has been done hitherto, that there is 
neither God nor devil in rerum natura, resentment against 
the order of the universe seems as absurd as the passion 
of Xerxes lashing the waves, or of the baby that hurts 
its knuckles by beating the ground it has fallen down 
upon. Our ills are real, but it does not follow that they 
have an author : we are not happy, but it does not follow 
that we have a jural right — against things in general — to 
the materials for happy life. The thing is naturally im- 
possible, and after spending a few years in convincing 
ourselves of its impossibility we cease to think of the fact 
as more unreasonable than various other inconvenient 
natural dispensations. 

The moral tendency of this discovery (the impossibility 
of happiness) has been recognised in many religions, 
notably in Christianity, and empirically formulated some- 

H 



H4 



NATURAL LAW, 



what to the effect that "the happy may be good, the 
melancholy must." But the logic of this inference is not 
quite apparent so long as we consider the existence of 
the acknowledged moral law, so to speak, from outside, 
as the rules by which people in general are objectively 
bound to act, instead of from within, in relation to 
the personal feeling that moves each man separately to 
acquiesce in the necessity of certain acts and forbearances, 
in view of other qualities than their pleasurableness. 
To the natural man, whose impulses and likings are the 
natural and necessary rule of his conduct, it appears mon- 
strous, anomalous, that he should have to do what he does 
not like, and he only does it under material compulsion. 
Even when we are too wise quite to expect the laws of 
nature to perturb themselves for our convenience, it still 
does not seem to us quite reasonable that we should do 
what we do not like unless we have something to gain by 
it — in this world or another. 

The grand moral lesson, which brings with it the pros- 
pect of release from the bondage of personal desire, is the 
discovery that we must do what we do not like, if we are 
to live at all ; first, because the world has so determined, 
and the world is stronger than we are; and secondly, 
because, even if our will were supreme upon earth, 
there is nothing in life that seems to us quite worth liking 
always and altogether. And this we must do without 
reward, since the universe owes us no gratitude, though 
we pay its laws the compliment of not expecting stones 
to fall up hill or ice to boil a kettle, not even though we 
cease to wish that the moral law, of which we feel the 
pressure, should be less inevitable than the laws of heat 
or gravitation. This experience of involuntary, inevitable 
endurance is the first step in the natural discipline by 
which men learn in case of need to prefer a natural to a 
moral evil. The power of endurance itself becomes a 
natural good, because in our imperfect world some evils 
are absolutely unavoidable, and others have to be endured 



MORALITY. 



115 



as the price of a counterbalancing good; and the same 
power, after meeting ns in such homely materialistic virtues 
as temperance and honesty, furnishes the foundation for 
every higher effort of zeal and devotion. We do not freely 
choose the life that offers us most pleasure and least pain ; 
we necessarily accept the proportions of both determined 
by outer circumstances, and the wide, far-fetched influences 
which have given the bent to our choice. 

If it were true that men lived only for pleasure, and that 
as long as the slenderest rag of enjoyment fluttered before 
their eyes they had no choice but to follow the bootless 
quest, piety would be impossible, for the position of 
the race would be one of chronic hopeless antagonism to 
the laws of nature, which are not framed with a view to 
their greatest happiness; and the fullest knowledge of 
those laws, while enabling them to make the struggle as 
little disastrous as possible, yet must aggravate their suffer- 
ings by showing the inevitableness of final defeat. The 
egotist's life is a losing battle. Except under the pressure 
of necessity, physical or moral, no one would spend his 
days in chasing a meteor, and there is no physical neces- 
sity, no moral obligation upon us, to go on pursuing pleas- 
ures that have lost their charm, and happiness, of which we 
doubt the existence. If there is any course fully accept- 
able to the disinterested judgment, anything right, neces- 
sary, and duly to be done, it is not this. 

If man were altogether a rational animal, it is impos- 
sible to say what he would do after the discovery of these 
and kindred truths. The most rational of writers 1 indeed 
affirms that action follows necessarily upon the full and 
certain apprehension of a truth ; but this sequence cannot 
of itself be considered strictly logical. Action is only 
rational considered in reference to an end; the function 
of reason in practical life is to show what intentions 
are compatible with fixed natural facts, but there is 



1 Spinoza, Ethic, iii. 1. 



ii6 



NATURAL LAW. 



no absolutely reasonable conduct, unless we assign that 
name to the broad rule of duty, the pursuit of perfection 
conditioned by the general laws of the universe, of which 
human reason is the highest exponent. No conduct can 
be called reasonable which ignores facts essential to the 
problem awaiting solution, and it is simply a fact of our 
nature that action may be determined by other motives 
than passion, or the suffering of a desire. 

Loose thinkers, to whom the notion that every being is 
ruled by the laws proper to its nature is naturally abhor- 
rent, may ask why the will accepts an unpleasant neces- 
sity, why the intellect affirms a painful truth : why not 
deny the troublesome necessity and disbelieve the un- 
welcome truth ? Certainly this is possible, since it is 
done, perhaps by the majority of mankind, but it is not 
done, because it cannot be done, by those who know of 
their own knowledge and experience that the truth is 
true and the necessity binding. Considerations of expedi- 
ency are absolutely out of relation to such matters ; it is 
a rhetorical exaggeration to say that men would believe 
that two and two made five if the hallucination were 
for their pecuniary advantage. No doubt they are most 
anxious to discover truths that have a pleasant sound, but 
it must be remembered that the facts of nature are not 
always pleasant, and that facts have a way of forcing them- 
selves upon our knowledge to the destruction of all but 
the one true theory of their nature and history. If we have 
nothing else but the clear consciousness of our place in 
the relations of the world, of that we cannot and need not 
wish to be bereft — the rather that forces which are too 
strong for knowledge are not likely to yield to ignorance. 

Morality begins with the consciousness of opposition 
between the nature of the individual and its environment, 
or rather with the reaction of the nature against the ex- 
ternal force which oppresses it. The material conditions 
of life are the cause, human sentiments, such as ambition, 
sympathy, love, are the motives, which make moral con- 



MORALITY. 



117 



duct necessary, and if the sentiments themselves are trace- 
able at last to natural physical causes, this is only a fresh 
instance of the way in which every natural tendency re- 
acts upon and reinforces itself. But, as the existence of 
jus, or the conception of law in general, can be kept sepa- 
rate from questions concerning the common qualities of 
just and lawful acts, so the mere existence of a moral law, 
or rule of right of some kind, is independent of the nature 
of its injunctions. The fact that the normal man feels 
obliged in conscience to acts and forbearances of a class 
does not tell us to what classes of acts or forbearances he 
will feel obliged ; and before coming to that further point, 
it would be well to have the source and character of the 
feeling of obligation itself, if possible, more clearly estab- 
lished. 

It will be admitted that men's actions are determined 
by their will, whatever opinion may be held concerning 
that which determines the will, a vexed question that 
we are not called upon to resolve. Jonathan Edwards, 
perhaps, after Spinoza, the ablest of Necessarians, says that 
"philosophical necessity is really nothing else than the 
full and fixed connection between the things signified by 
the subject and predicate of a proposition which affirms 
something to be true" — i.e., is nothing but the formula of 
natural fact : and again, " The will's beginning to act is 
the very same thing as its beginning to choose or prefer." 
It is allowed that the will does choose or prefer ; which is 
the same thing as asserting the necessary freedom of the 
will or active nature of man to be itself. Nothing is en- 
tirely within the power of our own will but our actions ; 
we can do as we will (indeed we cannot well do otherwise), 
but whether what we do shall produce the effects we de- 
sire to produce may depend upon circumstances altogether 
beyond our control. But the disposition of the will, i.e., 
the nature of the active impulses, is the only possible 
source of that self-imposed and self-accepted rule of action 
whcih we call moral, or duty — the only source, that is, 



n8 



NATURAL LAW. 



of the obligation, or of the consent, which gives to natural 
necessity the force of law by ensuring its habitual, con- 
scions fulfilment ; for this subjective disposition alone is 
permanent, and ready at any moment to become conscious, 
whereas the existence of external motives or inducements 
is accidental ; even when they are present, it is the choice 
of the will that makes them effective; when they are 
absent, the will generalises its own impulses ; and we call 
the result acting upon principle. If the will were entirely 
plastic, and followed unresistingly the variable impulsion 
of external motives, there would be no such thing as 
morality, for there would be no consciousness of constraint ; 
in matters held to be indifferent there is no such con- 
sciousness, because the will is in itself equally ready to 
adopt either of the indifferent alternatives before it, and 
suffers nothing if one of them becomes accidentally im- 
possible. In the same way, the sense of moral obligation 
is in abeyance if an absolutely irresistible external force 
impedes the natural action of the will ; where no choice 
is possible, the reluctant will does not act, it is passive 
or suffers. Tor the will to feel bound to do what it can- 
not do is a contradiction in terms ; the moral law has no 
impossibilities, which — according to Kant — is the proof 
that morality cannot lie in the pursuit of anything so un- 
attainable as happiness. 

Moral choice is to adopt the one of two physically pos- 
sible alternatives which that unalterable residuum of will, 
commonly called conscience, adheres to as involving the 
least departure possible under the adverse circumstances, 
from the general course of conduct which the organism 
would follow instinctively if circumstances were propi- 
tious. All the actions of a perfect man in a perfect world 
would be subservient to his continued existence in a state 
of perfection. Men, who are not perfect, find pleasure in 
some acts which do not contribute to their general perfec- 
tion, and the world, which is not perfect, makes some acts 
painful which do contribute to their general perfection 



MORALITY. 



119 



as men. Nevertheless, upon the whole, and especially 
when the present seduction of an easy pleasure is re- 
moved, the will takes counsel of reason, and resolves, not 
quite unnaturally, though with a sense of moral effort, to 
be itself — in such perfection as limited strength and intel- 
ligence will allow. 

At this point the argument brings us very near to 
Kant's categorical imperative, without, however, an exact 
coincidence. His precept, "to act always according to 
a maxim that might serve for a universal rule," does not 
indicate a motive for modest persons who feel no voca- 
tion to legislate for the universe, while his own legisla- 
tion depends upon theology for its sanctions ; but we find 
it to be true, a posteriori, that that conduct only is thought 
right which those who think it right desire to have uni- 
versally followed. "We do not eat our dinner hecause of 
certain biological laws — of which most probably we are 
ignorant — but the biological laws express one side of the 
natural tendency of men to dine once a day if they can. 
Similarly any one who endeavours to lead a virtuous life 
does not do so hecause he thinks it right to realise the 
highest possibilities of his nature; but the moral law 
formulates the natural tendency of men towards such 
realisation. There is no optimism in this ; for we do not 
deny that, tried by the general standard of what — as we 
say — men ought to be, the highest realisation truly pos- 
sible to most men is discouragingly low ; while of those 
by whom a higher ideal is conceivable, and therefore, in 
one sense, attainable, but few have the superfluity of vir- 
tuous strength required to overcome the material obstacles 
which the world and the flesh offer to the leading of a 
perfect life. We have not undertaken to justify the ways 
of the world to men ; and though it is not for naturalists to 
say that a better world than this was possible, we may 
without blasphemy admit that this world is not very good. 

Most of the obscurity in which the question of liberty 
and necessity is involved may be traced to a confusion in 



120 



NATURAL LAW. 



the use and meaning of the word possible. The will is free 
to choose between possible alternatives, but the number of 
possible alternatives may be rigorously limited ; — limited, 
a fatalist may add, to one — but if the will voluntarily 
adopts that one, the objection is scarcely significant. If 
half a loaf is put before a starving man, he does not eat 
it the less voluntarily because he may wish that it were 
whole, or buttered. If there are such things as moral 
struggles, which the advocates of freewill certainly do not 
question, the subject of such a struggle has to face a 
difficulty from which there is no escape ; the necessity 
either to yield to the difficulty or to overcome it is ab- 
solute ; there is no via media. Many of those who talk 
most of liberty as something essential to the dignity of 
humanity, seem not to understand the difference between 
supposing men to be free to do as they choose, and sup- 
posing them to be free to do as they would like to choose, 
that is, perhaps, to adopt an alternative which does not 
naturally exist, made on purpose to suit their fancy. Life 
would be intolerable if the will were not free to adapt 
itself, within moral limits, to the possible ; but life would 
be impossible — would not be at all — if the will were free 
in some inconceivable manner to alter the nature of things 
by arbitrary ex post facto decrees. 

To explain how the will should ever seem to be divided 
against itself, we must remember that the real, conscious 
man is not a pure spiritual unit, without parts or form, an 
undivided, homogeneous whole, but the subject of im- 
pressions and faculties as various and manifold as his 
nerves and muscles ; yet, though he may feel in many 
ways, he can only really act in one ; and these alternative 
necessities, the necessity of choice when inclination is 
divided, gives the moral sense of deliberate will, acting 
freely, by — or perhaps against — inclination, and not only 
free, but bound by the laws of its nature so to act. 

" To make a virtue of necessity " is one of those popular 
phrases in which much deep philosophy lies hid. The 



MORALITY. 



121 



scientific explanation of the real process so described, lies 
no doubt in the principle of accommodation, the way in 
which every organism adapts itself to the milieu in which 
it is placed ; but this is only restating the fact of necessity 
in fresh terms, for if the organism cannot adapt itself, it 
perishes as an organism — and its elements are absorbed 
in fresh combinations. The human race could not subsist, 
increase, and develop — which are the natural tendencies 
of every organism — without virtue, that is, the disinterested 
co-operation of individuals for the natural good of the kind ; 
those who withhold their co-operation are eliminated by the 
very fact, and count only as negative quantities, by which 
the race is minus so much active progress. But wherever 
there is positive vitality in a species, it is impossible that 
the vital impulses of the individuals of which it consists 
should, as a rule, be antagonistic — should not, as a rule, 
be subservient — to the preservation and vitality of the 
species as a whole. It is the imperfection of real exist- 
ence that makes the power of self-sacrifice a necessary 
condition of organic, and still more of social life, but as 
social life is a fact, the absence of the power would be 
as inexplicable as its presence is necessary. We call 
virtue good, because we are animals of a species that 
subsists after its kind thereby ; but when we say that 
virtue is necessary, we only mean that it is necessary to 
man : there is no reason to suppose that man is necessary ; 
he is as capable as morality of becoming extinct. 

But, it will be said, if everything that occurs, occurs by 
an equal natural necessity, what is the significance of our 
moral judgments ? Why do we condemn, or at least regret 
and resist some things ? To which the only possible answer 
is : By nature, which reasserts itself after every accidental 
disturbance of the normal order, and tends to restore the 
broken harmony. Good and evil are words that mean — 
what we mean when we use them — namely, results which 
our whole mind and feeling deliberately admires and 
approves, or condemns and rejects ; and though liking the 



122 



NATURAL LAW. 



pleasant and approving the good are not identical mental 
operations, one is to the full as natural as the other. Our 
moral judgments are compounded of a perception, that 
such or such conduct is good or bad, sanctioned by a feel- 
ing about goodness and badness, in the abstract and in the 
concrete, which is as rational as any other normal reaction 
under stimulus. The disposition of the will, as the ulti- 
mate exponent of the individual nature, is the sole source 
of moral obligation, but that does not interfere with the 
fact that some natures are more fortunately organised than 
others : and there are moments in the history of every in- 
dividual when the tendencies of the true nature cannot 
attain their full realisation without conscious effort and 
sacrifice. The power to effect such sacrifices upon occa- 
sion is a part of the natural good or specific perfection of 
men, and we call those natures fortunate in which it is 
most pronounced. But if we are asked — since it is only 
a misfortune to be wicked — by what right we blame 
people who do wrong from natural infirmity, the reply is, 
certainly, that man is not to blame, any more than provi- 
dence, for the misfortunes that afflict him. We call a 
malicious man bad, as we call a humpback deformed ; 
and, moral censures apart, we look upon it as evil fortune 
to be infirm, whether morally or physically. It is not 
exactly wrong to be humpbacked, but we would decid- 
edly rather that our spines should not curve ; though, 
indeed, if they manifest a tendency in that direction of 
their own accord, it may be a question — as it often is with 
our moral deformities — how much or how painful surgical 
treatment we are prepared to undergo in the attempt to 
straighten them. 

Objectors of the same class sometimes put, as trying to 
the practical efficiency of naturalistic morality, the case of 
a man inclined to be moderately virtuous, who says, Why 
should I take the trouble (if there is nothing to be gained 
by it) of "oeing more virtuous than I feel inclined ? which 
again is an unanswerable question, the rather that no 



MORALITY. 



123 



one but the person most intimately concerned can tell 
what his own inclinations are. But inclinations fluctuate 
and compete, and it is hard to be certain that any given 
disputant who, for the sake of argument, represents him- 
self as a cross between La Eochefoucauld and Sardanapalus, 
may not really be as much disinclined as the most austere 
moralist for a life of sensual indulgence and emotional 
isolation. If actual vice is considered to be out of the 
question (a large concession, which would not have been 
made to free-thinkers a century or two ago), and the 
degree of virtue to be practised is the only doubtful point, 
the case for the naturalistic theory of morality is that 
every inclination gains strength by indulgence, and that it 
is a question of degree how much, rather than how little 
virtue a well-natured person will find himself entrapped 
into finding desirable. It is not pleasant to be as virtu- 
ous, or as vicious, as we are naturally inclined to be ; in 
other words, the world is not constituted so that we may 
be happy by following our most natural inclinations. 
But there is nothing paradoxical in maintaining that in 
the case of any individual choosing between two courses, 
one of which he sincerely believes to be right and the 
other wrong, it does not on the whole conduce to his 
happiness to give the preference to the supposed wrong 1 
Other things being equal, a man will do what he thinks 
right ; when other things are so far from being equal 
that the normal preference for virtue is overruled, the 
victim of circumstances suffers, from the violence done 
to his true nature, which it is happiness for the in- 
dividual to be able to follow unimpeded. Cases are 
abundant, however, in which the scale of decision is 
turned, not by the objective pleasurableness of one 
alternative as compared with the rest, but by the strength 
of the man's inward bent towards noble, rather than easy 
living. Every power we have limits our liberty to be 
content without giving it exercise, and every power we 
exercise awakens sensibilities and tastes which make us 



124 



NATURAL LAW. 



subject to all the conditions which regulate their indul- 
gence. Mr. Spencer notices the existence of " a connection 
between progress in the impressibilities and progress in the 
activities," and if man found no stimulus to fresh action, 
in the necessities he recognises, it would not be true that 
" the advance of either involves the advance of both ; " 
but the powers which bring us under the sway of new 
rules are such as by their normal activity serve to enrich 
our life and perfect our nature. 

Dropping the ancient associations which bias the judg- 
ment when we speak of virtue and vice, the simple fact is 
that we have conflicting, incompatible impulses, and that 
the sacrifice of some is necessary when the reconciliation 
of all is impossible ; that the sacrifice of one class of im- 
pulses is as painful as that of the other; but the one 
sacrifice habitually appears, to those acquainted with all 
the circumstances of the case, as good, eligible, and to be 
accomplished, the other as, if inevitable, essentially deplor- 
able. Every one is as good as he can be ; and though it 
is a serious misfortune to all parties that men in general 
have not been able hitherto to be better, there is no reason 
in the nature of things why additional knowledge and 
wider experience should not have the same effect upon the 
mind of any particular sinner as the same influences may 
be supposed to have had upon his self-elected censor. It 
is true that we are most of us stupid — or society could 
never have got into its present lamentable entanglements 
— but we might all without much difficulty be just a little 
wiser than we are, and the aggregate effect of a number of 
such small improvements would be considerable. After 
all, the human race is of one kind : fools are rudimentary 
philosophers ; philosophers are developed fools ; and with 
the development of philosophy we may learn that it is not 
a law of nature for the lives of men to be made miserable 
by man. Human conduct is determined by many fixed 
conditions, but the conditions are not all discoverable, and 
the problem of what it is fated that we shall do, cannot 



MORALITY. 125 

"be solved prophetically even by ourselves, much less by 
any one else ; we learn our fate in fulfilling it ; but we are 
unfortunate if it is a part of our destiny to fulfil the most 
melancholy of all the various destinies we can conceive — 
that of an evil liver ; there is no natural connection between 
such a misfortune and necessarianism. 

It might still, however, be objected by a Utilitarian 
critic, that to prove morality to be necessary does not 
prove anything against its being conducive to the greatest 
happiness of the greatest number, and that if it is so, this 
fact, and not its necessity, will be the motive, as distinct 
from the cause, that leads men to act morally. Granted 
that it is not possible to live by inclination and be per- 
fectly happy, if we have seemed to maintain that the best 
(of many bad) chances of happiness is to indulge the 
virtuous propensities at the expense of all others, is not 
the theory utilitarianism in disguise ? And here it may 
be admitted that we have no reason to suppose that per- 
sons who are born with, or who have acquired such a 
temper as to find it habitually impossible to choose the 
worse of two alternative courses, are, on the whole, less 
happy than those with whom the possibilities are reversed 
or vary intermittently. The surest way of escaping the 
disappointment of self-regarding wishes is to have none, 
and the power of sacrificing inclination to a disinterested 
apprehension of what is good is attended, like the exercise 
of every other natural faculty, with a slightly pleasurable 
consciousness of vital force. Nevertheless, if the impulses 
are only sacrificed as a matter of calculation, and to secure 
a calm, passionless old age, the sacrifice may be regretted, 
and the ancient egotist find himself of all men most miser- 
able. To calculate upon the pleasures of virtue, the answer 
of a good conscience, the relief of duty done, is neither 
moral nor wise. It is not prudent to look forward to the 
few and distant moments of comparative ease that may no 
doubt be theirs who can say, after a lifetime of unprofit- 
able service : "We have done that which it was our duty 



126 NATURAL LAW. 

to do. The pleasure would not pay its cost. To do the 
painful right because we might in time come to find it 
pleasant, is like starving as a precaution against poverty ; 
and if we once admit that men are capable of feeling a 
moral necessity to sacrifice, not only happiness but life 
itself, to the natural good of humanity, the existence of 
a stronger motive than the instinct of self-preservation 
becomes apparent. 

Self-preservation is the natural good, the necessary 
motive of every isolated organism, but men are members 
of a social body, and we know by experience that the 
preservation of a whole frequently involves the immola- 
tion of its parts. Conscious acquiescence in this common 
necessity is the only peculiar prerogative of man, the only 
distinguishing characteristic of his share or co-operation in 
the eternal scheme of the universe, that which constitutes 
him in an especial sense a moral agent. 

Under favourable circumstances, the habit of well-doing 
forms itself by exercises which cost nothing but a healthy 
effort; but the moral bias, hereditary or acquired, ends by 
becoming so strong, in a few chosen natures, that the 
passion for perfection outgrows the natural love of life 
and ease and fame, and rather than give his sanction to a 
wrong, the righteous man will dare an unhonoured, pain- 
ful, fruitless death. " Skin for skin, yea, all that a man 
hath will he give for his life" — but if it is a man's life to 
do well and endure wisely, and the choice lies between 
death and ill-doing, how can it be otherwise than naturally 
easiest to him to die ? — or, living still, to endure any other 
natural ill rather than the moral death of hateful action — 
of action fraught with natural evil to the unoffending sons 
of men ? But the mental attitude of the man who deliber- 
ately resolves to follow his own highest impulses, at what- 
ever personal cost, is altogether different from that of one 
who resigns himself to paying the needful price for a 
desired pleasure. 

We are nearing the confines of the practical question. 



MORALITY. 



127 



Morality exists. What, then, is the conduct men praise 
as moral ? Hitherto we have considered morality from 
the subjective side, as the sense of duty or obligation 
incumbent on the self. But most of our moral concep- 
tions include the idea, not only of a duty binding on some 
one, but of a duty towards some one else. The fact that 
men have duties follows from the fact that their will acts 
under conditions not of their own making. The fact that 
most of these duties are imposed by consideration for 
other interests than their own follows from the fact that 
the life of men in society is mainly conditioned by the 
acts and feelings of their associates — in a word, that the 
many weigh more than the one, and that each Self, in 
proportion as its acts and desires involve it in relations 
with other Selves, must act and wish in conscious reference 
to their acts and wishes. 

This is so much the case that the words altruism and 
egoism are used without much straining to denote moral 
desert and its opposite, as if self-indulgence were habitu- 
ally bad, and the indulgence of any other self than the 
agent habitually good. And this is really the case, if we 
emphasise the "habitually," because in the shorthand 
of thought we understand by indulgence the giving of 
pleasure without effort ; and it is easier to give ourselves 
noxious pleasures than it is to give noxious pleasures to 
other people, at least we have more temptation to do so, not 
only because in their case we may ourselves be the victims 
of the noxiousness, but also because our judgment is less 
biassed by private passion, so that we can estimate con- 
sequences more exactly. Still the standard of right in 
particular cases is no more to be found in the likings of 
my wife or next-door neighbour than in my own: it is 
simply an empirical generalisation that I am more likely 
to be seduced into wrong-doing by my own inclinations 
than by theirs, though the latter also is possible. Strictly 
speaking, my duty towards them is the same as my duty 
towards myself — i.e., to minister to their wellbeing ; but 



128 



NATURAL LAW. 



without accepting the dictum of those social philosophers 
who deny the existence of self-regarding duties, it is clear 
that the peculiarly moral element of self-devotion is neces- 
sarily least conspicuous in such acts, for by self-interest, 
rightly understood, we mean the pursuit of natural, not 
merely sensible good, and the attainment of a natural self- 
regarding good never results in a predominance of sensible 
evil in its consequences. 

Hence the definition of moral conduct seems almost to 
narrow itself to the satisfaction of claims for social services. 1 
But it still remains a question whether this is the widest 
synthesis of motive attainable. Is Humanity the supreme 
lawgiver, because our chief duties are to men ? Is there 
any other God, and have we duties to Him ? or is our life 
conditioned wholly by the natural forces, among which our 
susceptibilities of passion, impulse, and reason are the chief? 
And if our life is conditioned by nature, what is our duty 
to — and in — this natural world ? — and whence the feeling 
which makes us accept with something more than resig- 
nation the laws which bind our will ; and is our obedience 
to these laws — if indeed we do obey — due after all to this 
vague, unexplained sentiment of piety that makes us 
imagine, before we know, obedience to be the better 
part? 

1 See Addenda F. , page 369. 



IV. 



RELIGION. 



"Sed humana potentia admodum limitata est et a potentia cansarum 
externarum infinite superatur; atque adeo potestatem absolutam non 
habemus res, quae extra nos sunt, ad nostrum usum aptandi. Attamen ea 
quae nobis eveniunt contra id, quod nostrae utilitatis ratio postulat, aequo 
animo feremus, si conscii sinausnos functos nostro officio fuisse, et potentiam, 
quam habemus, non potuisse se eo usque extendere, ut eadem vitare pos~ 
semus, nosque partem totius naturae esse, cujus ordinem sequimur. Quod 
si clare et distincte intelligamus, pars ilia nostri, quae intelligentia definitur, 
hoc est, pars melior nostri in eo plane acquiescetet in ea acqniescentiaperse- 
verare conabitur. Nam quatenus intelligimus, nihil appetero nisi id, quod 
necessarium est, nec absolute nisi in veris acquiescere possumus; adeoque 
quatenus haec recte intelligimus, eatenus conatus melioris partis nostri 
cum ordine totius naturae convenit." — Spinoza. 

"Look straight to this, to what nature leads thee, both the universal 
nature through the things which happen to thee, and thy own nature 
through the acts which must be done by thee." — Makcus Aueelius. 

" Magna res est amor, magnum omnino bonum, quod solum leve facit 
esse onerosum et fert aequaliter omne insequale ; nam onus sine onere 
portat, et omne amarum dulce ac sapidum efficit. Amor Jesu nobilis ad 
magna operanda impellit, et ad desideranda semper perfectiora excitat. 
Amor vult esse sursum nec ullis infimis rebus retineri. Amor vult esse 
liber et ab omni mundana affectione alienus ne internus ejus impediatur 
aspectus, ne per aliquod commodum temporale implicationes sustineat aut 
per incommodum succumbat. Nil dulcius est amore, nil fortius, nil altius, 
nil latius, nil jucundius, nil plenius, nil melius in caelo et in terra."— De 
Imitatione Christi. 



The natural history of emotion— All human knowledge, belief, and percep- 
tion natural, because all received through the natural faculties of man 
— The existence of religion, if not otherwise explicable, might have to 
be referred to an otherwise unknown principle, the existence of which 
would, however, even then be known naturally, as that of an unseen 
planet, by its action — Men find themselves affected by forces that are 
Not-man, and do not at once conceive any of the forces as unconscious — 
Natural religion, e.g., of savages, dread of uncontrollable power to injure. 
Later stages, apprehension of uncontrollable power not irrationally 
malicious, and personification of the moral influences of the Not-self in 
man — Agnosticism and the Cultus of the Unknown — Personification of 
the imagined cause of a felt impression — Spiritual religion the senti- 
ment called forth in the individual by the apprehension of the Not-self 
in its most general aspect, as the one real, irresistible power in which 
the self is included ; or by the apprehension of as much of the moral 
influences of the Not-self as can be personified or interpreted by personal 
agency — Dualism unspiritual because the sentiment towards the Not-self 
is weakened by division — Comte : Humanity great, but not supreme ; 
does not inspire the true religious devotion — The religious sentiment one 
of complete (yet dynamic) acquiescence in the tendencies of the whole 
by which the tendencies of the part are now consciously conditioned ; the 
two tendencies are identified, but without any sense of obligation or 
effort in the weaker, for feeling is naturally free, and supposing the 
religious conversion of the will or nature to be complete, co-operation 
with the " stream of tendency " becomes truly voluntary and spontane- 
ous—Query, whether the religious sentiment is equally reasonable in 
all ages — Strong piety most rational when human aspirations after the 
Best possible find themselves most nearly in harmony with the spon- 
taneous course of things — Rational faith only belief in the reality and 
trust in the power of goodness— Unequal strength of natural power and 
natural aspiration— Atheistical religion. 



IV. 

RELIGION. 

Law sanctions what men are; morality sanctions what 
men wish themselves and each other to be; religion, as 
commonly understood, might be described as sanctioning 
what God wishes men to be. Waiving theological con- 
troversy, it will be apparent that law and morality, as 
above described, account for all that part of men's conduct 
which consists in the discharge of personal and social 
duties, or actions performed with a consciousness of con- 
straint or obligation ; and that the sphere of religion, as a 
binding force, is therefore restricted either to the actions 
which men perform spontaneously, with a sense of freedom, 
or to their emotions, which are not properly susceptible of 
constraint at all : in other words, we have here done with 
law and enter upon the field of religious liberty. 

The only way in which we can conceive a law to exist 
without its being felt as constraining is for the constant 
relations between different things formulated in the law 
to pass into the consciousness of the one conceived as 
more peculiarly subject to the law, not as a necessity 
compelling to acts and forbearances of a class which would 
not have been performed voluntarily, but as a necessary 
release from other irksome, arbitrary, or accidental com- 
pulsion. Such a release we have seen to be afforded to 
men by positive law from the caprices of other men, and 
by morality from the bondage of " chance desires " of their 
own ; if their subjective emancipation is to be completed, 
religion must release them at once from the sense of 
bondage to the natural conditions and accidents of human 
life, and from the sentiment of reluctance which may, and 



I 3 2 



NATURAL LAW. 



usually does, attend the deliberate submission of the will 
to law. But since religion does not affect the objective 
validity of the other laws with which we have been con- 
cerned — the laws of nature, of society, and of human 
morality — whatever change it effects in the conscious- 
ness of the human subjects of such laws must plainly be 
immaterial and emotional. 

There are two parts in every rational action, the will 
and the intention, or the act and the desire, and the 
natural, normal agreement between these two may be 
disturbed ; but any form of passion, suffering, or emotion 
is in its nature simple, irrational, and where there is no 
consciousness of division or antagonism, the first element 
of law, or constraint, the juxtaposition of two natures in a 
necessary relation, is wanting. No one feels bound to feel 
otherwise than he does feel, any more than any one feels 
bound to be something entirely different from what he is. 
It is easy for a real, slight feeling — as of gratitude or 
affection towards a person plainly deserving of such regard 
— to be mistaken for, or concealed by, a non-natural, 
second-hand remorse, produced by the impression that 
other people, under the circumstances, would have a stronger 
feeling of the same kind. But though people may vaguely 
wish that they were as good specimens of their kind as 
somebody else, they do not really feel bound in conscience 
to be other than they are, namely, the subject of moral 
aspirations of such and such a degree of strength and 
efficiency, though the aspirations may be regarded as an 
incipient tendency towards advance to a higher stage of 
moral development, at which fresh tendencies and aspira- 
tions would become both possible and necessary. Still, 
no criticism of the emotions in their actual development 
at any given moment is possible : if we attempt to judge 
whether a feeling is wise or right, the feeling vanishes at 
the very moment, at least until the critical mood is over. 
The emotions begin and end with themselves, or rather 
with their conscious subject ; there is no room for wisdom 
in states of consciousness that can only exist in one way 



RELIGION. 



133 



— as they are involuntarily felt to be. Yet all the more 
complex emotions are feelings towards or about some 
other object, by the nature of which they must be in some 
manner conditioned, if the relation is to be orderly and 
observant of perceptible constant laws. 

In the absence of precise knowledge concerning the 
physical basis of consciousness and the different physical 
conditions of sensation, emotion, and thought, conjecture in- 
voluntarily takes the form of hypothesis, and we compose 
our minds with the expectation of finding hereafter proof 
of the opinions which now impress us as most likely to be 
true, or if not exactly true themselves, yet most like what 
the truth must be. There is not yet proof to go before a 
jury upon, and yet it seems both credible and probable that 
sensation is the subjective side of certain objective molecu- 
lar changes in the organism produced by outer, material 
influences. Sensations by repetition accustom the organs 
of sense to certain modes of vibration or molecular move- 
ment, which, thenceforward, may be excited by the faintest 
touch suggestive of similar movement, or may even con- 
tinue automatically without stimulus. We believe Mr. 
Lewes is parent of the suggestion, that these normal sets, 
or patterns, so to speak, of vibration, do as a fact fall into 
other patterns or groups among themselves, and that 
feeling or emotion is the consciousness of such more 
elaborate groupings of set forms of nervous agitation. 
This is not proved, but it is eminently provable as well 
as probable ; and it is only by some such explanation as 
this that the growth of feeling can be made thoroughly 
intelligible to the reason. 

The character of normal human feeling, as of normal 
human conduct, has been systematically explained as the 
outcome of personal and inherited experience of pleasure 
and pain; the emotions are supposed to be favourably 
affected towards felicific influences, and unfavourably 
towards whatever causes or is associated with pain. We 
have already attempted to show that this is virtually 



134 



NATURAL LAW. 



trying to explain the whole by a part, for the very sense 
of pleasure and pain itself must, on our view, be the con- 
sciousness of opposite kinds of relations, some jarring, 
some concordant, between groups or patterns of moving 
molecules. But this sense of discord and harmony is only 
one of the secondary feelings about things which grow 
from the repeated feeling of the things themselves. The 
eye rises from the sensation of form and colour to the 
perception of grace and beauty, but we have no a priori 
notions of beauty which would guide our judgment towards 
received canons of taste, even though all the present laws 
of optics were reversed or confounded. Similarly with our 
loves and hates ; we have no preconceived theory of what 
should charm us, but we grow by degrees into a mental 
habit of sympathy with every act and symbol of gracious 
goodness and loving power, and these affections become a 
part of ourselves, so that we interpret every new sensation 
by their light. Thus the feelings, like the impulses, attain 
to an independent life of their own, not at the mercy of 
momentary inducements. 

The origin of each mental feeling, its true antecedent 
sine qua non, is seldom if ever another mental feeling, it 
is the existence of a certain group of more elementary 
sensations which become articulate in the consciousness 
in that particular form by virtue of their combination. 
We are not at present concerned with the development of 
feeling into thought, which may be conceived as the appro- 
priate consciousness of still more complex relations among 
composite groups of sensation and feeling — or a sense of the 
grouping of groups ; but this would be the logical continua- 
tion of the former process, and unless the whole of it has 
been misapprehended, it would follow that, barring casual 
fallacies, thought and feeling are alike based on rational 
reality, so that knowledge and passion, instead of being 
antagonistic, appear as both alike the creation of the objec- 
tive fact which, when created, they serve to reflect. 

Thus it is that while single movements of feeling are 



RELIGION. 



135 



almost completely independent of the reason, human 
feeling is on the whole rational and trustworthy, and 
the habitual inclination of feeling as respectable as the 
habitual inclination of the will. Enthusiasts for the re- 
ligious emotions and the impulsive side of human nature 
are not content with this admission, but wish to have 
religion exalted above morality, and feeling more trusted 
than thought. To find a partial justification for the com- 
mon order of arrangement (which we have followed), 
which treats the broadest facts of feeling as a kind of 
climax, as possessing for mankind a higher, more inde- 
feasible kind of authority than the judgments of pure 
reason, we must remember the double character of all 
human experience. If thought is a development of feel- 
ing, feeling is not the higher product, but it is the deeper 
root, and it is more possible for a concerted change of fact 
and feeling to modify belief than for additional knowledge 
to alter the spontaneous affection of the mind towards 
the things known about. The most general conclusions of 
human feeling at any period are a degree more necessary 
and immutable than contemporary beliefs of the same 
degree of generality, though special feelings are a degree 
less necessary than a theory of which the truth is condi- 
tioned by broader, more elementary feeling. 

The comparative authority of feeling and reason as a 
guide for conduct depends, however, on another set of con- 
siderations. A present feeling is or may be a direct motive, 
thought only suggests action through the medium of an 
associated feeling. Also feelings are in relation with 
present, concrete realities ; thoughts only with generalisa- 
tions about permanent qualities, which by themselves 
suggest no action or wish ; hence the true or real motive 
for present action may be more discernible to feeling than 
reason. But, on the other hand, should a doubt arise as 
to which motive — simple feeling or feeling grown into 
thought — had better be allowed to prevail, the thought 
which is conditioned by all the facts of the past is more 
infallible than the feeling or desire which is conditioned 



136 



NATURAL LAW. 



by those bearing on the individual at the present moment. 
But the general disposition of human feeling towards outer 
influences is, after all, the result of broad conditions, and 
the conscious intellectual generalisation which grows out 
of the unconscious emotional one would itself be worthless 
unless this also were in normal correspondence with the 
real relations of things. 

The intensity of a passion depends upon and varies with 
the susceptibility of the subject, or person by whom the 
passion is felt ; the occasion, or as in merely personal 
relations, we should say, the recipient of the affection, 
influences its character as compared with other affec- 
tions of the same subject, but within limits that cannot 
but be fixed by the nature of that subject. Eeligion, 
as it does exist, or as it ever has existed, cannot be 
regarded as anything supernatural while it deals only 
with that which real men have actually felt or done under 
the influence of feeling. The notion of early rationalists 
that religion was invented by priests to serve their 
private purposes may be considered as exploded; but 
even at the present day it is not unusual to hear religious 
or superstitious beliefs spoken of as if reason had no 
concern with their existence as soon as they are proved to 
be unfounded, which is not often a task of much difficulty. 
But if the belief as it stands is entirely unfounded, while 
the belief is nevertheless commonly held, the phenomenon 
is one that calls most urgently for rational explanation. 
Most vulgar errors arise either from a natural and easy mis- 
interpretation of real occurrences by a false analogy, or 
from something peculiar in the phenomenon itself, which 
makes familiar analogies misleading and ordinary methods 
of interpretation an unsafe guide in dealing with it. 

The common belief in the existence of supernatural 
beings would be entirely inexplicable if there were no 
real foundation in nature for the impression which men 
have (and to which religion is the answering sentiment), 
that their lives are controlled by some irresistible, im- 



RELIGION. 



137 



palpable, superhuman force or forces. More than this 
general apprehension of a mighty ISTot-ourselves it would 
' be vain to seek as common to all mankind in its religious 
moments, and if the more elaborate religions which have 
prevailed in historical times were strictly accurate in 
their doctrines, this fact would be as mysterious and un- 
accountable as the existence of any religious sentiment at 
all is on the principles of an intolerant, supercilious scepti- 
cism. On the one hand the very common diffusion of the 
religious sentiment, on the other its usual weakness, and 
not infrequent absence have to be accounted for, and if 
that general apprehension of the Not-self, which we have 
supposed to be the basis of religion, takes place by means 
of the ordinary human faculties, this result is exactly 
parallel to the tentative progress towards approximate 
agreement between consciousness and fact which charac- 
terises human science and morality. In spite of the pal- 
pable errors of all systems of religion, the religious senti- 
ment survives, because in all, or nearly all religions, it has 
been possible for religious minds to ignore the false for- 
mula, and only be really moved by the spontaneous feel- 
ing of loving awe which makes obedience to the natural 
laws both of life and society not only voluntary but easy 
and contented. 

One of the points in which primitive and scientific 
thought agree is a tendency to regard all the external 
forces amidst which the individual moves as substantially 
of kindred nature. In early society when law and 
morality are still undistinguished, religion unites with 
both, and the general sentiment, of resigned acquiescence 
in the will of a higher power, in which it consists, supplies 
the place of whatever is wanting to the logical complete- 
ness of the natural sanctions of customary morality. 
Society, nature, and conscience are all dimly conceived 
together as something different from the unit of conscious 
will, which performs one simple action at a time at their 
united bidding. When a distinction corresponding to that 



138 



NATURAL LAW. 



analysed in the preceding chapters between law and 
morality, or objective and subjective checks, has become 
a reality, the sphere of religion becomes either more 
contracted and intense, or wider and less practically im- 
portant, according as natural forces, or the tendency of 
natural forces, are personified and idolised — in astrolatry, 
fetishism, and anthropomorphic mythology — or as the rela- 
tions amongst natural forces, human and otherwise, are 
viewed synthetically, and produce a particular sentiment 
in the comparatively limited number of individuals capable 
at once of the wide view and the emotional response. 
There is ample room for religious error or misbelief in 
religious developments of the first kind, but mistakes 
that have a merely natural origin may be depended upon 
sooner or later to die a natural death ; there is a limit to 
human powers of believing the thing that is not, and 
whenever that limit is reached, the system of false doc- 
trine or imaginary facts either collapses at once at a. 
vigorous denial, or is tranquilly ignored by more and 
more general consent. 

We are only concerned with the historical phases of 
religious development so far as is necessary to show that, 
as soon as law and morality came to be distinctly con- 
ceived apart from each other and from religion, the course 
of all three became independent, though not necessarily 
divergent ; and that religion, so far from serving as a basis 
to morality, can only attain to its fullest development when 
the moral education of the race has reached a point that 
makes religious reverence necessarily include sentiments 
of moral regard and admiration for the object of worship. 

Most recent writers agree in holding the religion of the 
savage to consist of unintelligent, uncritical terror. Even 
to the civilised man there is something mysteriously im- 
pressive in power of which the seat is altogether inacces- 
sible, and there have been ages when the simplest natural 
fact, if it was reflected upon at all, would be unintelligible 
enough to be awful. 



RELIGION. 



139 



Most of the apparently meaningless superstitions of 
savages refer to the region of the unknown, the unverifi- 
able, and the unreal ; but most of them are either rational 
from the savage point of view, or the remains of custom 
which had once some reasonable motive or suggestion; 
that is to say, though their rise may have been (and pro- 
bably was) irrational as a consequence of the given pre- 
mise, still they did not arise in the first instance without 
some, cause or ground. And even these first aberrations 
of the human imagination have a claim on our respect, if 
we are content to recognise in them the first independent 
workings of the subjective element in man, the first result 
of the dawning human power to see things not only in 
their sensible relations among each other, but in the new 
light shed by human feeling on their ideal existence, as 
having a distinct, peculiar relation to man. Now it is 
certain that many natural objects have, in addition to their 
sensible qualities, an influence of a purely immaterial kind 
upon the lives of men, and though, except in a religious 
reverence for fire, and the fantastical scruples which regu- 
late his dealings with certain animals, the savage rarely 
betrays any perception of the real influences to which he 
is subject, yet the faculties which are capable of rising to 
such a recognition may be used meanwhile to believe in 
influences that are not real, and in causal chains every 
link of which, except the first or last, may be imaginary. 

A subjective connexion between two phenomena is 
established merely by their being thought of together, 
and unless we suppose all the impressions of the savage 
to be literal reproductions of the facts of nature in their 
historical order, the connexion will sometimes be mis- 
taken. 1 The most common source of error is perhaps the 

1 What Mr. Tylor says of magic might be extended to most forms of 
superstition — that " it is based on a delusive tendency arising out of the 
association of ideas, namely, the tendency to believe that things which are 
ideally connected in our minds must therefore be really connected in the 
outer world." 



140 



NATURAL LAW. 



conjunction of a strong hope or fear with the thought of 
some untried, or the memory of some effective means for 
producing or averting the result anticipated. "To see 
how an effect may be produced is often to see possible 
missings and checks ; but to see nothing but the desirable 
cause, and close upon it the desirable effect, rids us of 
doubt, and makes our minds strongly intuitive." This 
way of establishing sequences, as a modern philosopher 
has observed, is too common even at the present day to 
be counted as a peculiar folly in those found guilty of it. 
The desirable cause is, of course, the present possible act 
that suggests itself to the mind; no sooner has it been 
performed with full and earnest intention than expecta- 
tion of the desired result begins; supposing the act, as 
may be most often the case, to have no influence either 
way, expectation will continue, if its gratification in the 
course of nature is an even chance, until it is either grati- 
fied or disappointed, but the habit of expectation leaves 
so much profounder traces on the mind than the moment 
of disappointment, that the strength of the subjective 
connexion may become thoroughly established as a super- 
stition without even the crudest kind of inductive inference 
for its support. 

It may be doubted whether, without this power of 
believing the thing that is not — or rather of believing 
something, till the thing that is can be known — the human 
mind would ever have taken eourage to grapple with its 
own ignorance, or would have contracted the habit of 
believing in causal sequences at all, for those which are 
clear and undeniable do not invite analysis, while those 
which are longer and more remote escape notice altogether. 
In this way religious speculation becomes of vast import- 
ance to the early history of progressive races, while in 
others it stops short at the establishment of arbitrary and 
meaningless ceremonies. What has been said of the effect 
of expectation might seem sufficient to account for the 
practice of prayer, to fetishes or other unknown powers, 



RELIGION. 



141 



because prayer, or concentration of the mind upon a 
desired end, both heightens expectation, and, if it appears 
as an antecedent fact to the realisation of the desire, 
would naturally, and even reasonably, be regarded as its 
cause, while primitive man could in no case regard the 
prayer as the cause of so unlike an effect as his dis- 
appointment. In most cases, too, there is probably a little 
half-unconscious self-deception, like that of the Mandan 
rain-makers, whose surprising success in their art is ex- 
plained by the statement that they always go on with 
their incantations until the rain comes — as it must soon 
or late — while the man who has once made rain with eclat 
is careful not to risk his reputation by trying a second 
time. 

But beside prayers, which cost nothing (unless offered 
by deputy), most savage religions, if they can be called by 
so respectable a name, abound in prohibitions and com- 
mands which are useless as natural means towards their 
professed end, and yet continue to be observed disinter- 
estedly, as well as observances of which the first and only 
attraction seems to be their positive painfulness. The 
explanation is partly mental and partly physical. An 
unoccupied mind finds stimulating suggestion in a prohi- 
bition, when natural impulses that really need ruling are 
still too few to engross the thoughts. The typical savage 
looks upon the objects familiar to him in the same spirit 
in which the writer overheard two civilised children call 
upon each other to read the regulations printed outside 
the gates of a suburban park. " We had better read this," 
said the elder, who was still young enough to find reading 
a new and exciting enterprise, " or perhaps we shall be 
doing something that we oughtn't :" to a child or savage 
in this " law-thirsty" mood even an injunction " not to 
walk upon the grass " is welcome, and certain to be re- 
peated with authority. Many rules of barbarous etiquette 
are to be explained by this intellectual craving after 
regulation for its own sake, and the craving assures the 



142 



NATURAL LAW. 



permanence of any other custom that has the semblance 
of an independent foundation in reason. In the Chinese 
classics morality and ritual are even comically indistin- 
guishable, because both are made to rest upon the same 
sentiment of material propriety ; and even in societies as 
civilised as our own, most sincere, unintelligent religion 
might be explained, or described, as inherited feeling 
attached to an abridged formula of duty and ritual, which, 
if once pulled to pieces, could certainly not be restored, 
by any rational process, to its present form. 

Eeligion might continue to consist of dim fear and fear- 
born rites as long as fear of the unknown was a motive 
habitually determining whatever part of the conduct was 
neither rational nor automatic ; but religion of this sort, 
though as absolute as the power of a mad tyrant over a 
barbarous people, is not capable of surviving the natural 
tendency, which it shares with most things earthly, to 
develop its leading characteristics with self- destructive 
consistency and zeal. Early fetishism supposes every 
action of natural force which affects the individual to be 
in that final and composite form, the result of will; but 
from this point of view the various necessities personified 
become so numerous that it is impossible to class any as 
invariable, and the human mind, which would be incapable 
of acting at all in the chaos it has over-hastily imagined, 
begins in self-defence to introduce order and measure into 
its pantheon. As this process advances, the difference 
between the religion of the few and of the many begins to 
make itself felt. In religious cosmogonies, the attempt is 
made to unify the conception of the Not-self, at least so 
far as to allow of its history being told intelligibly to 
man ; while in popular religions, when the number of gods 
acknowledged has been brought within manageable limits, 
separate divinities, each of whom we must suppose origin- 
ally to have represented some one real aspect or influence 
of the Not-self, engross all the limited capacity for religious 
feeling of which the average idolater is possessed. 



RELIGION. 



143 



Theosophies and mythologies preserve the tradition of a 
relation between man and that which is not-man, but they 
do not rationalise what is real in the relation, or spiritualise 
the human sense of its existence. Gross misconceptions 
of the nature of the Not-self in its relations to the self 
will be corrected by prolonged experience of those rela- 
tions as they really are; but if those relations are less 
close, concrete, and immediate than they are generally con- 
ceived to be in idolatrous religions, we need not be surprised 
at finding, as in fact we do find, that religion, in shaking 
itself clear of mythology and superstition, comes to occupy 
less space in proportion in the consciousness, and to exer- 
cise less influence on the conduct of the generality of men. 
An amount of intellectual power which is not common by 
itself, and which is still less commonly combined with 
highly developed emotional sensibility, is necessary to 
make religion at once vital, rational, and spiritual; and 
though a very beautiful development of the moral nature, 
such as is sometimes to be met with in the uneducated 
classes, or amongst women, may to some extent supply 
the place of intelligence, it is generally true that religion 
is spiritual in proportion as it is rational. Accordingly 
spiritual religion is even more rare than rational thought, 
indefinitely more rare than a simple obedience to the 
dictates of law and morality. 

We may assume every human thought or feeling to 
have some cause, occasion, or counterpart in nature, with- 
out supposing that the thought or feeling is necessarily 
adjusted so as to correspond in all points with the thing 
that suggested it. True wisdom and happiness (of which 
religion has often been thought to have the secret) lie in 
an effective coincidence between the power that is real 
and the influence believed in and acknowledged — that is, 
between human feeling and the permanent conditions of 
human life ; and the tendency of human development is 
towards such real and conscious harmony, if only by 
clearing away the confused ideas and factitious impres- 



144 



NATURAL LAW. 



sions of which false religions are compounded. With the 
advance of natural, or as it is now called, positive know- 
ledge, religion becomes more entirely subjective, that is, 
more concerned with the feelings of man towards the Not- 
man, and less with the direct action of the Not-man upon 
our race ; and while one source of error is thus diminished, 
another is opened by the possible misdirection of the re- 
ligious feeling already in existence. A sentiment good 
and natural in itself may fall wide of its supposed object, 
and it would be easy to show that the only cases in which 
religion has been clearly injurious to human progress are 
those in which fine, unpractical emotion has been either 
simply wasted or dangerously misapplied. Both of these 
results may follow from the confusion which is not un- 
frequent between religion, or matters of sentiment, and 
morality, or matters of conduct. It is a psychological 
impossibility to feel to order, but people may easily believe 
that it is their duty to act as if they felt something which 
they do not feel, and such a course is extremely likely to 
react upon their real feelings, much to the detriment of 
their perfect religious spontaneity. And if religious feel- 
ing, which, for the reasons indicated, is much more variable 
than the sense of moral obligation, should happen to be 
amongst the motives by which conduct is determined, in 
cases when the sentiment was itself mistaken, effects as 
disastrous as any of the incidents in religious persecutions 
may easily ensue. 

It is difficult for criticism of the religious sentiment to 
go into much detail without running the risk of arousing 
the odium theologicum, which is the more unnecessary 
in the present case because the theory of religion here 
suggested is too far outside the current creeds to come 
naturally into collision with them. As in the case of law 
and morality, the existence of a constraining influence 
must be distinguished from its nature or effects. Eeligion 
exists because the life of man is conditioned by other than 
human forces ; the operations of nature are independent of 



RELIGION. 



*45 



human law and human morality, and human life is not 
independent of the operations of nature ; nay more, even 
human law and human morality, the steps by which man 
rises to a height from which he surveys, as a critical 
superior, the operations of natural law — these steps are 
themselves only the supreme expression, the last develop- 
ment of the all-pervading, unbroken sequences of nature. 

We have no reason to suppose that the elements of the 
inanimate world are conscious of the influence which their 
orderly persistence exercises upon the generations of men 
who fall under it ; and the loose mysticism which talks of 
the universe attaining to consciousness of itself in man is 
unscientific as well as unpractical, for it is but a fraction 
of the universe that so becomes conscious, and it is only 
conscious — and that but imperfectly — of itself and such 
other fractions as lie nearest to it. But the influence of 
the universe upon man is not the less real for being un- 
consciously exercised, and being real, man may become 
conscious of it as affecting himself, which it does in two 
ways : first, by physical causation — for it will be admitted 
that the bodily nature of man is conditioned by the 
material circumstances of the world in which only organ- 
isms of a certain kind can lead the life for which they are 
fitted ; and secondly, as an object of perception and more 
or less adequate knowledge, and the occasion of such 
feelings as arise in the human subject when it becomes 
conscious of the impressions and thoughts thus received 
from without. 

As has been said, a confused apprehension of the first 
kind of influence is the source of most gross religious 
misbeliefs; men promptly become aware of effects pro- 
duced upon themselves or their circumstances without 
their own co-operation, but the identity of the natural 
cause or causes which produce the effect and their modus 
operandi are not distinguished till later, are not to this 
day always distinguishable. Idols are made by premature 
or inaccurate reasoning from effects to causes, and the re- 



146 



NATURAL LAW. 



ligious feeling which they, so to say, intercept, can never 
be as profound or lasting as that which is awakened by a 
true sense of real power. More rational, spiritual religion 
is not confined to the recognition only of such agencies as 
immediately affect the subject ; and anything that can be 
perceived or known, but not produced or materially modi- 
fied, may become the object of disinterested religious 
regard, as a part or aspect of the Not-self. Periods of 
theological controversy and perplexity are only to be ex- 
pected when the apprehension of real facts and relations 
in the Not-self is clear enough to call forth feelings of 
religious strength in the self, while it is not yet understood 
that the significance of the facts and the very existence of 
the relations is itself altogether relative to the emotional 
nature of the percipient man. 

Laws, scientific, political, and moral, state the true rela- 
tions of real things, but in so far as these relations are 
conditioned by unconscious being, they cannot be supposed 
to have any intentional bearing upon the individual per- 
ceiving them ; the effect upon his mind of the perception 
is and remains subjective, and any attempt to account for 
the impression produced except by the relations which 
produce it, or for the existence of the relations except by 
the existence of the things related, by introducing an 
imaginative, incogitable element, favours the notion that 
religion deals with things supernatural, not merely with 
things superhuman. But things supernatural and in- 
cogitable, of which the existence cannot be perceived nor 
the efficiency calculated, are to reason non-existent. It is 
only that which, at some point or other, comes in contact 
with some sensibility or faculty of the human mind that 
has any existence at all for the human mind ; the contact 
may be indefinitely slight or indirect, but without such 
contact the existence is not even thought of as possible, 
except in the way that any arbitrary combination of terms 
is possible. 

The association between theological or theistic belief and 



RELIGION. 



H7 



any kind of religious feeling is so close at present, that 
to most people the question, Has religion a natural, neces- 
sary, and reasonable existence ? virtually means, Is there 
a God or no ? Positive convictions of all kinds are in- 
tolerant, and to any one who has a definite theory of 
how, or by what means, the moral order of the world is 
secured, all the other hypotheses of theological science or 
metaphysical nescience, are subject to the one common, 
fatal drawback — that they are not true. It is possible to 
hold an opinion so confidently as to believe every other 
opinion to be false, and yet to know, with at least equal 
strength of conviction, that we ourselves are at least as 
fallible as the rest of the world. We believe in the pos- 
sibility of our own view being mistaken, but meanwhile 
it is our view — that the mistake lies with those who differ 
from us. And though, from some points of view, it may 
be more useful to dwell on points of agreement than on 
points of difference, as was said, every positive construc- 
tion is intolerant, and the outline of our own convictions 
forms a sharp line of exclusion against the opinions which 
we hold to be false or confused. 

The opinion whieh we feel impelled to exclude in this 
way at the outset is that which rests on an unholy 
alliance between ignorance and faith — the compromise 
which allows men to believe anything they like, provided 
they know no reason to the contrary, and encourages them 
in not knowing what they prefer to ignore, by treating 
ignorance as a coequal ground of inference with know- 
ledge. If there is a true scientific faith, agnosticism must 
be heresy, and the term includes alike the quasi-orthodox 
who appeal to the ignorance of opponents, and claim 
licence to believe anything that the said opponents have 
not wit or courage to disprove, as well as the half-fledged 
rationalists who claim tolerance from dogmatists because 
they are too modest to say anything worse of a dogma 
than that it has not yet been proved to their satisfaction. 

If we have a clear and adequate apprehension of any 



148 NATURAL LAW. 

truth, its opposite is not conceivable to us as true, and 
both religion and philosophy would gain if the issue be- 
tween theism and natural philosophy were more clearly 
defined, and the rival alternatives more courageously faced. 
The real question is, Have we reason to believe in the 
existence behind or above the Knowable Not-ourselves, of 
a person, or power, to whom, or which, we can and must 
stand in a spiritual relation ? Does philosophy prove the 
existence of the (or an) Unknowable ? and does religion 
prove the Unknowable to be God? It is scarcely in- 
telligible that those who answer these questions in the 
affirmative should be content without further illumination, 
as if the modern race of men had attained to the Olym- 
pian calm of Epicurean deities, and gods might be, and yet 
men have no care for things divine. Those who answer 
in the negative, at any rate, are concerned to show that 
they do not thereby propose to sacrifice any positive result 
of human development, only to give a different interpreta- 
tion of real fact, and eliminate from the region of belief 
doctrines to which no answering realities can be dis- 
covered. 

There is nothing known, felt, or imagined by man, ex- 
cept that which human powers can know, feel, or imagine. 
The counterparts or occasions of these human experiences 
are real, sensible, conceivable, to be cognised: for, if we 
consider, knowledge or perception of a cause is only know- 
ledge or consciousness of an effect produced under condi- 
tions which are also known or perceived, and the con- 
sciousness of the relation between the effect and the 
condition is itself only an affair of knowledge and per- 
ception ; and we cannot distinguish one part of our know- 
ledge as less essentially authentic than another part ; it is 
all susceptible of the same kind of verification, and is dis- 
tinguishable by the same kinds of test from corresponding 
varieties of human error. Before forming an opinion as to 
the possibility of metempirical or supra-sensible know- 
ledge, we should require to know precisely what is under- 



RELIGION. 



149 



stood by the terms. We may assume sensation, emotion, 
and thought to be invariably attended (if not caused) by 
certain modifications of nerve and brain matter; but, if 
all our knowledge of things consists of inferences to the 
effect that there is an objective reality answering to our 
varying impressions, how can we infer the existence of 
something to which we have not had, and are not sup- 
posed to be capable of having, a corresponding impression ? 
If some kind of physical affection attends every act of 
consciousness, what kind of physical affection attends the 
cognition of the supra-sensible ? Is it distinguished from 
natural knowledge by having no physical conditions at all, 
or by having no immediate objective condition beyond the 
state of the subject's mind ? 

The two questions : Does the Supernatural exist ? and, 
Can it be known to exist ? are really different aspects of 
the same, because an affirmation that the supernatural 
may exist, or that it cannot, is in itself a profession of 
knowledge respecting it, and that respecting which natural 
knowledge is possible, is, by the very fact natural, as 
natural — in the wide sense in which Comte and Spinoza 
use the word Nature — as any single sensible intuition. If 
we examine and compare the different conceptions of the 
supernatural entertained by philosophers and the vulgar, 
we shall find that all agree more or less clearly in regard- 
ing as supernatural the existence of disembodied spirits 
and the modification of human consciousness by purely 
immaterial agencies. There is nothing else to which the 
word supernatural would be certainly and unanimously 
applied by believers in the supernatural. Now it is 
evident that real modifications of consciousness, even 
though produced by other than physical and intelligible 
causes, must be felt or perceived if they exist ; their esse 
is percipi ; if they are perceived to exist, the perception 
itself must be natural or supernatural ; if the perception 
is supposed to be supernatural, that is, unaccompanied by 
normal physical modifications or nervous movement, most 



NATURAL LAW. 



physicists will simply deny its existence ; if the percep- 
tion is natural — and it is a simple fact of experience that 
men have believed and do believe in the existence of 
ghosts, of God, and of the Unknowable — the natural ante- 
cedents or conditions of its production can be investigated. 

The problem to be solved is : Do they believe for good 
reasons — natural or supernatural — or for bad reasons — 
natural or supernatural ? There may be a perfectly 
natural and accountable state of mind consisting of false 
belief in supernatural entities; this is admitted on all 
hands, and only amounts to saying that the errors of the 
imagination may include the nature or existence of things 
as well as their relations and manifestations. Similarly 
we can imagine a natural and accountable state of mind 
consisting of true knowledge of God, as a moral governor 
of the world, which might be attained by man if the world 
really were perceptibly subject to such government, in the 
way conceived by such writers as Butler and Paley. The 
permanent and orderly production of a class of effects, with 
no other assignable constant antecedent than the will of 
a person otherwise unknown, is inferred with considerable 
plausibility to follow from such a cause, if that and no 
other appears naturally adequate. Such inferences may be 
mistaken, like any other conclusion, but the method is not 
self- evidently faulty. The hypothesis of a supernatural 
ground of error, such as the deceptions of evil spirits, need 
hardly be considered seriously; and the last remaining 
alternative of a valid supernatural ground for human belief 
in and feeling about things supernatural, is the one in 
which most shades of confused thought have finally taken 
sanctuary. 

The reason that Spinoza's definition of passion, as a con- 
fused or inadequate idea, has not been more generally 
accepted, is probably that he has been understood as 
meaning that emotion and thought are the same thing, 
only one good and the other bad of their kind. The same 
is a dangerous phrase, but the real distinction between 



RELIGION. 



thought and feeling would not be affected by the historical 
identification of the final stage of the one with a transi- 
tional or introductory passage in the growth of the other. 
The thronging groups of impressions, which are just upon 
the verge of crystallising into the new and lucid form of an 
intelligible proposition, fill the consciousness meanwhile 
with an inarticulate murmur which the uncritical ear may 
easily mistake for revelations of an unknown tongue. If 
we take as the premise of reasoning the consciousness of 
a man in whom the sense of such confusion is at its climax, 
the objective reality answering to his impression may be 
inferred to consist of Impenetrable Mystery, but this is 
only a reproduction of the primitive blunder which infers 
a numerically distinct original for every subjective im- 
pression, whether it be a correct intuition or a fallacious 
inference. , 

With regard to the natural sense of mystery — begotten 
by Ignorance upon Curiosity — the inference is. certainly 
premature. We are assuming all states of consciousness 
to be the product or accompaniment of definite physical 
modifications, or conditions ; and from this point of view, 
ignorance, the being without a particular piece of know- 
ledge, is not a mere negation. The nerves of a person, who 
does not know this or that, exist as positively as the 
person who does know or the person who erroneously 
believes himself to know, they are only differently affected. 
Before admitting that science can demonstrate the exist- 
ence of an Unknowable, we should want to have it made 
clear how the organs of perception are affected when the 
mind is convinced of the existence of something imper- 
ceptible. When, however, we pass from the unconscious 
but perceivable conditions of thought to thought itself, we 
cease to regard ignorance, or the want of knowledge, as 
anythiog real : the word only denotes the negation of 
scientific belief caused by the absence of some or all of 
the elements essential to the constitution of positive 
knowledge. But this negation is concerned with thought 



152 



NATURAL LAW. 



not with existence. That we do not know whether a 
chimera buzzing in vacuo can devour second intentions 
does not prove that chimeras and second intentions 
are unknowable entities. The realism linking at the 
bottom of most thinking would make this a dangerous 
way of expressing our sense that the problem is an amus- 
ing absurdity. 

To say that a tiring is unknowable is to say less than 
nothing about it, because unknowableness is not a property 
of things in themselves, but of things in relation to a mind 
with faculties subject to such and such limitations. To 
say that something unknown is, may be true and signifi- 
cant, if the word unknown is held to mean nothing more 
than that existence is the only property which can at 
present be ascribed to the thing in question. To say that 
we have a knowledge of unknowable existence is a con- 
tradiction in terms ; but we may have a tolerably clear 
and adequate idea of the limits of our own positive know- 
ledge, and beyond those limits it is certain that we know 
nothing. We have valid reasons, physical and metaphy- 
sical, for believing that the limits of thought are not 
coextensive at any given moment with the limi ts of exist- 
ence, and we therefore infer the existence outside our 
knowledge of a more or less thinkable unknown. But 
this speculative inference is homogeneous with the rest of 
our knowledge or thought ; it presupposes no supernatural 
factors either in the unknown or in the state of conscious- 
ness in which existence of the unknown is conditionally 
affirmed. The unknown is the conceivably knowable, not 
something generically different from the known and only 
conceived by contrast or opposition to it. 

If all knowledge is transformed and organised sensation, 
what sensation, we ask, can give the knowledge of some- 
thing the essence of which is that sense cannot perceive 
it, and that the organised conclusions of sense in thought 
affirm nothing respecting its qualities or relations. The 
fact that we have not had a sensation of an entirely new 



RELIGION. 



*53 



order does not prove that something exists capable of pro- 
ducing sensations that we have not had, and yet such an 
inference is hardly more imaginative than the argument 
that when we have come to the end — or the beginning— 
of our knowledge, we necessarily assume in thought the 
existence of an objective substratum or boundary, a per- 
sonification, so to speak, of the idea of limitation, external 
to the thought which, by the hypothesis, we had come to 
the end of. 

The mental state answering to the perception of an 
unconditioned unknowable is one of simple, blank uncon- 
sciousness, not a positive consciousness of the presence in 
nature of a mysterious blank. No naturalist denies the 
existence of mysteries in nature, but the sense of mystery, 
the oppressive feeling of excited, unsatisfied curiosity, does 
not carry us a step beyond the point of positive knowledge 
previously attained ; it discloses no new property of things, 
only the relative proportion of the mixed knowledge and 
ignorance possessed concerning the things felt to be mys- 
terious. The attendant sense of awe or perplexity is best 
explained as the mental consciousness of imperfect or 
confused knowledge; and this consciousness shows no 
tendency to disappear with the progress of knowledge, of 
which one chief result is the increased development of 
curiosity, by the suggestion of new things that might be 
and are not known. But rational inference proceeds from 
knowledge to knowledge ; from the contemplation of our 
ignorance we can learn nothing but its extent, and though 
this study also may have its moral use as a discipline of 
humility, we can hardly expect to learn what constitutes 
moral perfection from experience of what constitutes 
mental imperfection. Edification is even less to be looked 
for than instruction from the philosophy which brandishes 
the conception of a mighty x as a sort of two-edged muzzle 
for science and religion. 

Hitherto we have only considered what may be called 
the external evidences (real or supposed) for the existence 



154 



NATURAL LAW. 



of some spiritual power in trie Not-self; but as religion 
gradually frees itself from accidental historical encum- 
brances, and assumes its permanent emotional character, 
we observe a not unnatural tendency to attribute mere 
subjective changes, variations in the mood of the self, when 
no other cause for them is known, to the direct, immediate 
action of the Not-self, making itself felt by the mind in 
some altogether peculiar, supersensible manner. When 
the extreme closeness of the connection between the 
modifications of the mind and those of the body was less 
apparent than it is now, there was nothing absurd in the 
belief that one mind or will could directly influence 
another, the only mistake lay in assuming that the pro- 
cess, supposing it to be real, must be called supernatural, 
because it was rare or peculiar. Even now, if we suppose 
the physiology of thought to have made all the progress 
it presumably will, it is perfectly conceivable that some 
Force, not otherwise perceptible, should be found to have 
the property of traversing or correcting the ordinary course 
of mental processes by inducing fresh modifications in the 
molecular composition of the brain. The existence of such 
a force would be sufficiently proved by its action, and its 
nature would be known and described by the effect it 
produced, as there are chemical substances of which the 
presence is inferred from some unexplained effect, before 
they have declared themselves directly to any of the 
senses ; or as the existence and position of an unseen planet 
may be determined by perturbations in the orbit of those 
already known and observed. Of course in scientific in- 
vestigations every possible hypothesis is exhausted before 
the presence of a new element or power is assumed, and 
no attempt has ever, so far as we are aware, been made to 
prove the existence of a deity in this mechanical, a posteriori 
manner. 

Inferences drawn merely from the emotional vicissitudes 
of religious experience scarcely bear the test of impartial 
reason, and are not, as a fact, chiefly relied upon by the 



RELIGION. 



155 



ablest religious doctors in ages of more faith than the 
present. Common experience shows how feeling towards 
or about an absent person, or about an action past or con- 
templated, will vary from day to day, perhaps from hour 
to hour, while the real circumstances are the same, even 
in our thought, and the real qualities of the person or the 
action do not, we know, fluctuate with our opinion. It is 
only in religious experiences that such changes of mood 
are supposed to have an immediate objective cause, so 
that the intelligible effects of physical or pathological con- 
ditions may be treated as ultimate facts of the spiritual 
consciousness, serving as a foundation for inferences re- 
specting antecedents of the same spiritual order. 

It is generally admitted that the most vivid and seem- 
ingly realistic temptations and consolations of men like 
Bunyan, Luther, or Loyola are half-hallucination, the work 
of an inward voice, the echo of the soul's own mood, and 
every authoritative manual of devotion contemplates for 
the believer periods of trial and desolation in which his 
most sincere efforts may fail to recall the living sense 
of spiritual communion with the powers invoked, failing 
which he feels himself to be a castaway ; no one but 
the person concerned really believes that there is any 
objective process going on outside the mind of the saint 
corresponding to the (real) experience within, most de- 
scribable in the phraseology of the penitential psalms. 
Even pious Christians are willing to admit that the sense 
of answered prayer, in regard to spiritual blessings, is vivid 
in proportion to the strength of the desire felt for their 
possession, and it is hard to convince a naturalist that 
faith strong enough to believe in the answering of prayer 
is too weak to be its own reply, when only spiritual or 
subjective consequences are required. 

Comparatively few persons are sustained in their re- 
ligious convictions by the higher, more intimate and 
imaginative phases of religious experience : but many who 
believe, in a more or less perfunctory manner, that there 



NATURAL LAW. 



are gods (three in one) who concern themselves about 
human affairs, do sincerely think that the most im- 
portant incidents of their outer life (after they have hap- 
pened) were ordained to happen by a moral governor of 
the universe. Every one instinctively and in a manner 
necessarily regards the incidents which concern himself 
as really grouped in the manner in which they pre- 
sent themselves to his feeling — as of course they really 
are— though not less really in a thousand different ways, 
visible with equal clearness to other centres of conscious- 
ness ; while to the dispassionate eye of reason, each several 
mode of stringing together the actual occurrences is true — 
from an arbitrarily narrowed point of view, but worthless 
as a formula for the general relations among all the things 
concerned. We may cover a sheet of paper with circles 
described from equidistant centres, and then take every 
point of intersection as a new centre with an indefinite 
number of radii. Each spot may conceive itself as in the 
midst of nearly any geometrical pattern it pleases to see or 
to invent, but no description of these visionary stars or 
rosettes will give us the key to the method by which the 
confusing network was arranged ; and so it is also with the 
network of natural chances in which men are entangled. 

People as a rule are only vividly conscious of incidents 
that concern themselves, and out of the whole number of 
these incidents it is practically certain that a considerable 
number will not merely be naturally connected amongst 
themselves, but will also admit of being classed together in 
consciousness as tending the same way, or working to- 
gether to produce the same effect. If a man has fully 
formed plans and wishes, which one accident after an- 
other prevents him from realising, he generalises his expe- 
rience, and calls himself unlucky, as in the opposite case 
he learns to have faith in his star. But supposing he has 
had misgivings as to the moral rectitude of his purpose, 
the checks he meets with may seem designed to warn 
him from the path of error ; and conversely, if his ruling 



RELIGION. 



157 



intention is to follow the call of duty, not inclination, 
every objective possibility or opportunity of doing the 
duty which he recognises, appears as a " leading " or direct 
indication of the will of Providence concerning himself 
and his conduct. To most people, however, the greater 
part of life is no more taken up with the conscious deliber- 
ate pursuit of duty than with that of happiness, and it is 
only in the more serious crises of life, when one difficulty 
more or less may turn the scale of failure and success, 
when one more loss may turn courage to despair, or a 
single act of help make effort hopeful and strong, — it is 
only then that trifling incidents become so pregnant of con- 
sequences that few men can resist the temptation to feel 
that the mighty accident must have a cause proportioned 
in power to the importance of its effect — on themselves. If 
they are theists by profession, they see without difficulty 
the will of God concerning themselves ; if not, they ask in 
perplexed wonder, what have they done to the universe 
that it should deal thus and thus with them ? why should 
they of all men have fate meddling with their affairs ? 
whence the mysterious power of the Not-self over the sons 
of men ? 

The belief in God is kept alive much less by the belief 
in actual miracles — which must have a supernatural cause^ 
since, by the hypothesis, no natural cause is equal to their 
production — than by this other belief in what we may call 
facts of the mind, arbitrary constructions built out of real 
materials, but with a connection that is only subjectively 
real. The bankruptcy of A may be caused by the dis- 
honesty of B, and cause C to emigrate instead of marrying 
D, to whom he was engaged. D calls her disappointment 
a " cross " or a " trial," and enters a sisterhood, and in the 
placid middle age of religious women, with small amuse- 
ments, small agitations, abundant routine, and complacent 
conviction of having chosen the better part, she looks back 
gratefully to the Providence which led her to this happier 
state. But if this method of interpretation were consist- 



i 5 8 



NATURAL LAW. 



ently followed — and no theory is true that will not admit 
of consistent application — every motive, opportunity, or 
desire might in the same way be ascribed to the working 
of the Divine will, thus made a party to everything that 
occurs, as in the purest extravagances of pantheism. It 
is hardly necessary to fill in the outlines of an opposite 
case to the last. A girl or boy has exalted dreams of self- 
sacrifice and religious consecration ; trivial accidents of 
time and place favour the growth of relations that point 
to another vocation, and it is quite within the limits of 
probability for the sober father or mother of a Christian 
household to thank God for having been providentially 
saved from the ill-advised ambition of their youth after 
saintliness or martyrdom. 

It is evident that those in whom religious feeling and 
faith are intense will have more abundant demonstration 
of the existence of the powers they believe in than the 
worldly. Those who have learned to see the hand of God 
in the changes of their own mood, resulting from physical 
or moral causes of the most personal nature, are sure also 
to be quick at imagining the outer circumstances which 
affect their spiritual life to be controlled in the same way 
and towards the same ends as the vicissitudes of their 
spiritual life itself. And since people are inwardly moved 
by the influences present to sense or imagination, a felt 
influence becomes the stronger for being associated with 
an imagined cause, all the effects of which are precon- 
ceived as supremely potent and good. Those who have 
made it their chief object to do the Divine will (as they 
understand it), and have a general outline of belief as to 
what this will must be, are more susceptible than others 
to leadings or opportunities afforded from without for 
more and more complete conformity to the same will. It 
is difficult to uproot old associations, and we may even go 
so far as to say that for minds thoroughly impregnated 
with theological ideas, the familiar formula really expresses 
a larger portion of truth than a perfectly correct scientific 



RELIGION. 



159 



statement, say, about the " stream of tendency," to which 
they would attach no meaning at all, or a quite mistaken 
one. 

It is for the many who find the theological hypothesis 
meaningless and incredible that we offer the above ac- 
count of the facts innocently distorted by the undisci- 
plined imaginations of virtuous persons, whose egotism, 
banished from the heart, has taken refuge in the brain. 
We do not say that the patterns in the diagram are unreal ; 
they are real to the feeling of centre A or centre B, who 
are conscious of no influences except along just these con- 
verging lines ; but the true statement of the relations in 
space of all these points is infinitely more general, the 
full statement infinitely more complicated than anything 
we can get at, even by adding together the impressions of 
the various centres. It would baffle a mathematician to 
find terms for the number of positions which each centre 
might occupy in the innumerable figures which may be 
described from each of the rival centres, all constructions 
being equally possible, from the single point of view 
adopted, equally true in reference to the consciousness 
which accepts them, and equally inadequate to a mind 
accustomed to class its intuitions impartially in accord- 
ance with the objective proportions of things. 

If we agreed with those writers, religious and otherwise, 
who hold religion to be of its nature supernatural, we 
might perhaps be tempted to see nothing but super- 
natural imbecility in the elaborate " exercises " of the 
heart and mind undergone by our pious forefathers. But 
if we believe religious ideas and feelings to be entirely 
natural in their growth and origin, we shall expect to 
learn much about the natural working of the human soul 
in its emotional apprehension of things not human from 
the great writers who have made such processes the study 
and employment of their life. A theory of what religion 
is now, or may be in the future, is hardly susceptible of 
more precise verification than what may be afforded by its 



i6o 



NATURAL LAW. 



adequacy as an account of what religion actually has been, 
according to persons eminent for religious gifts and 
entirely innocent of rationalistic bias : though, at the 
same time, it must be remembered that the foundation of 
primitive theological conceptions depends on rather dif- 
ferent conditions from those which enable their applica- 
tion to survive into a state of things in which they could 
not possibly have been formed anew. 

As soon as the stupid terror of the savage is spiritual- 
ised into a reasonable awe of transcendent, superhuman 
power, the mind rises to a confused intuition of the Not- 
I as a moral force, which it then for the first time be- 
comes, when this natural and reasonable awe is found to 
control the will and moderate the passions, partly by the 
mere spectacle of a stern and lofty impassivity, partly by 
the unconscious development of an intuition that the stars 
in their courses do not fight the battle of evil and self- 
indulgence. Consistent belief in divine intervention in 
human affairs comes, as was observed, practically to the 
same conclusions as the courageous pantheism which 
ascribes all that is done to the life and will of the one 
living substance. And even though we refuse to personify 
the All, we must admit that it is from the All, the real 
universe in which we live, that all those influences pro- 
ceed of which we become conscious as ruling our moral as 
well as our bodily life. And if we, whose habitual mental 
attitude towards the natural world is one rather of obser- 
vant criticism than of reverence, are nevertheless con- 
strained to such an admission, it cannot surprise us that 
primitive religion should have instinctively recognised the 
presence of some such authority. The vital consciousness 
of a real omnipresent power which prompts the Psalmist's 
complaint, " If I go down into hell, thou art there also " 
— though it has disappeared, or nearly so, with the 
elaborate anthropomorphism of modern Christianity, and 
the partial, familiar explanations of scientific analysis, 
may yet revive in a quiet literal way when the sceptic or 



RELIGION. 



161 



atheist, after mentally denouncing several of the laws of 
human and material nature which hamper his' wishes, sees 
at last, in these or other laws, the necessary explanation 
of his own discontent, and really and finally discerns that 
his revolt, if he does revolt, is still a fatal submission to the 
necessity which made him incapable of the wiser, earlier, 
voluntary acquiescence. 

But the fear of the Lord is only the beginning of wisdom, 
and the mere recognition of an external supreme power is 
scarcely of itself religious ; for it to become so habitually 
or normally there must be some natural constancy of 
sympathetic relation between the self and what it acknow- 
ledges as its superior. The religious sentiment which 
consists in the going out of the whole emotional nature of 
the self towards that which is Not- self can only have a 
natural and necessary existence in human experience if it 
is possible for the whole being of man to become conscious 
of itself as subject to the collective influences from without 
by which it is really modified. We began by describing 
religion as the sentiment which arises in the human self, 
when it becomes conscious of its own relation towards the 
apparently infinite Not-self. That relation is primarily 
and chiefly one of dependence, but religion does not lie in 
the sense of that dependence, but in the emotion, whatever 
be its nature, which arises after a clear and adequate 
apprehension of the relation has been attained. Such an 
apprehension does not imply an exhaustive knowledge of 
the Not-self considered absolutely, to which human facul- 
ties are. by the nature of the case inadequate, but the 
relation of a conscious being, as such, is only real so far 
as it is conscious, or potentially conscious, and the only 
condition of the emotion is that the consciousness should 
be complete. 

It is through the moral and intellectual powers of his 
nature, as knowing and acting, that the individual man for 
the most part becomes aware of the collective influences 
from without in which his own native tendencies and 

L 



NATURAL LAW. 



instincts are, as it were, swallowed up. The scientific 
laws of nature (including human nature) and the moral 
law of conduct determine between them the fashion in 
which he will think and act, and the effect which his 
actions will produce ; but we must remember that these 
laws, that is to say, the real relations amongst existing 
things, only systematise our knowledge of those things by 
formulating the methods of their existence ; they tell us how 
things are, but they do not account for the fact that they 
are. Of course this is one of the points at which a theo- 
logical solution is frequently offered with great confidence, 
but if it is offered to reason, it must be rejected for want 
of terms in which it can be intelligibly expressed, for we 
have had no experiences qualifying us to form any idea 
corresponding to such a process as the creation of things 
in themselves ; and if it is offered to faith and the religious 
emotions, it is unnecessary, because they find no difficulty 
in the existence of that which they themselves only exist 
to acquiesce in. By knowing the laws of the nature of 
perceptible things, the self is enabled to modify to its own 
advantage some of the effects to be produced by the things 
actually existing at any time, but the number of such 
things and the laws of their manifestation are at any 
given moment capable of being apprehended as the really 
supreme and contro lli ng influence by which the being of 
the self is conditioned. 

The intuitions of pure science produce an acquiescence 
in truths or facts of relation which is scarcely religious, 
because it is not concerned either with the causes or effects 
of that which is known. To know a thing is to assent, to 
acquiesce in its reality, and the exercise of the faculty of 
knowing is attended with a natural pleasure that almost 
overflows into enthusiasm for the truths known as reaL 
But in the pursuit of special sciences, the student, though 
he sits with pious attention at the feet of Xature and 
receives her instructions with docility, reserves the right 
of interrogating her upon one subject rather than another, 



RELIGION. 



and is guided in his choice more by the knowledge which 
he himself wishes to possess than by the claims or influ- 
ence of the Unknown as a whole. 

The difference between science and the philosophy 
which we maintain to be religious is parallel to that 
between mere morality and the true, purely subjective 
religion of the regenerate or "converted" — the feeling 
which, whether reasonable in its origin or not, comes into 
being somewhence, and, we suppose, by no supernatural 
means, but which, when it has come into existence, is only 
feeling, perfectly disinterested, unpractical, uncritical, self- 
contained emotion. Any less massive power than this fails 
to overcome the real difficulty in the way of conceiving as 
an object of proper religious emotion a sum of forces which 
are independent of any associations of sanctity, independent 
of personality or consciousness, of purpose or intelligence, 
of love or will — in brief, of all those analogues of human 
faculty which even pantheists and mystics implicitly attri- 
bute to the divinities of their imagination. What at the 
present day generally passes for religion, as the religious 
themselves acknowledge and deplore, is a more or less 
unintelligent acquiescence in a few theological formulae, 
more or less infrequent paroxysms of sentimental remorse 
or aspiration, and a more or less confused belief, very 
seldom present as a controlling force, in the existence of 
a higher power than the self with its small aims and 
wishes. An edifice of this kind collapses when the rotten- 
ness of its foundations is exposed, but there have been 
men, very able thinkers, and by no means of hysterical 
temperament, to whom religion has been the supreme 
science, the mainspring of action, the guiding force of life, 
and the essence of true natural religion, if it can be found 
anywhere, must lie in a feeling, independent of creed, 
common to all souls in whom the intelligence of the 
affections has received its fullest development. 

Eeligious feeling must be distinguished from religious 
creeds, but creeds may be roughly classified by the impor- 



NATURAL LAW. 



tance or propriety of the place they leave for feeling. 
Monotheism, Dualism, Pantheism, and Mysticism are 
names that serve to cover most of the hypotheses under 
which men have conceived their relation to the supreme 
forces outside themselves. When familiarity with the 
action of natural forces has bred contempt for their un- 
intelligent mechanical efficiency, and the vast intricacy 
and variety of their interaction is not yet apprehended 
by the intellect, and therefore cannot stir any emotional 
enthusiasm, men begin to personify the moral influences 
to which their lives are subject, in the same way that 
fetish worshippers personify the physical action of material 
nature. The religious errors to which this practice natur- 
ally leads are less dangerous, because the divinities made 
out of idealised natural forces are not usually more moral 
in their supposed conduct than the forces themselves, of 
which the best that can be said is that their influence is 
altogether outside morality, since it is innocent of inten- 
tion or consciousness. The moral influences, on the other 
hand, of which men become conscious outside themselves, 
can be tried by human standards, and only such of them 
will be naturally selected for religious worship or idealisa- 
tion as are really admirable according to prevailing moral 
ideas. Law, for instance, or justice, are moral realities, 
and if they are worshipped it is always in a state of ideal 
perfection, but to worship an abstract idea, or a relation 
in its native immateriality, is an achievement scarcely to 
be expected from populations at once imaginative and 
emotional enough to find some concrete object of worship 
essential. The transition from deified virtues to virtuous 
deities is as natural and gradual as that from personified 
forces to persons whose will is supposed to be a force. 
Both steps are intellectually retrograde, though the latter 
at any rate seems to have accompanied a moral advance. 
As the standard of human morality became clearer and 
higher, men lost the power of feeling religiously towards 
imaginary beings that were not even equal to themselves 



RELIGION. 



165 



in some important points of reason and morality; and 
since the religious feeling persisted, the inference took 
shape — if there are Gods, they must "be good. The same 
generations that seemed to be incapable of reverencing 
truth, mercy, and justice, unless in the garb of gods of 
that ilk, by dwelling upon these moral qualities as attri- 
butes of real objects of affection, acquired a habit of 
valuing them more. Men gathered moral courage to call 
a bad god a devil, and renounce the worship of devils, 
though their moral faith was not yet strong enough to 
resist the second inference — if there is goodness, there 
must be Gods — to make or exemplify it — as if love could 
not be real unless Eros were a person, or wisdom venerable 
unless Pallas Athene and her owl embodied it, or justice 
and holiness divine unless Jehovah was Lord of a heavenly 
host of winged Seraphim and Cherubim. 

As it is from the action of men upon each other, and 
distinctly not from the action of nature upon men, that 
human notions of goodness are derived, we find that all 
attempts to define or describe the divine excellences, or 
a perfect Not-self, begin by supposing human virtues 
indefinitely magnified and exalted. An intellectual pre- 
ference for the simplest statement of a proposition may 
have had something to do with the advance from poly- 
theism to monotheism, which, however, could hardly have 
taken place without an accompanying desire to bring 
together in one object absolutely every power or quality 
felt to be adorable. The founder of an historical religion, 
in offering to the adoration of his sectaries, what is in 
practice only a magnified self, is not conscious of any 
imposture, he simply yields to the necessities of the case, 
which have made Bouddha an object of worship in spite 
of the (traditional) resolution of Sakya-Mouni to preach 
neither himself nor a god made in his own image. An 
historical religion lives and exercises more or less control 
over its votaries for as long as its prophet, or the God he 
preached, continues to represent or symbolise such aspects 



NATURAL LAW. 



of the Xot-self as call forth all tlie power of religious 
susceptibility in the age. The success of such religions 
is generally proportioned to the degree of objectivity which 
has been given to the original revelation, or in other words, 
to the extent to which its founder has made friends of 
the mammon of unrighteousness — of unspirituality — and 
brought the deitv so near to the senses or imagination 
of the worshippers that they find it easy to feel about liim 
as a person. 

It would seem paradoxical to say that religions based on 
idolatry were more moral than those based on theosophical 
theories, and yet, if we use idolatrous in this general sense 
to indicate a mistaken concentration of feeling upon im- 
aginary entities, it is true that the mistake may be morally 
beneficial, provided the feeling which it causes to be culti- 
vated and developed was itself the outcome of a healthy 
moral state. But each new step of normal development 
results in the casting off of some fresh husk of natural 
error, and as moral intuitions become more exact, after the 
association of duty with religion, an instinctive sense of 
the conditions of human virtue troubles the simple ideal 
of divine perfection. Primitive man can imagine gods that 
suffer through imperfection or defect ; idealised Paganism 
requires its gods to embody the perfection of natural good 
— they must be perfect after their kind, whether that kind 
be morally perfect or no — and rejects as blasphemous the 
conception reverted to by Christianity, of a suffering God, 
which is the next — and logical — expression of the diffi- 
culty, or rather the impossibility, of forming a clear, 
close, and sympathetic conception of transcendent virtue 
combined with triumphant power and unbroken happi- 
ness. Human virtue, we find, consists in the pursuit of 
perfection under conditions which give a sense of difficulty, 
constraint, and self-denial to the pursuit, and we cannot 
form a clear and adequate conception of superhuman 
virtue under superhuman conditions, that shall yet affect 
us as human virtue, carried to an ideal infinity of perfec- 



RELIGION. 



167 



tion. Of course there are persons whose state of mind 
allows them to think that they apprehend as possible the 
existence of a Being who both is and is not potent to alter 
the essential nature of things ; who might have made the 
highest good attainable without effort or suffering, but has 
not done so becaitse no human good is so high as that which 
is attained by painful virtuous effort. But Christianity 
stands almost alone among religions in having tried to find 
in theology the key to all that is mysterious in existence 
after the mysteries had assumed dimensions that made 
simple religious feeling unable to cope with them; and 
when religious feeling has to call the intellect to its de- 
fence, unless the foundations of the feeling are in all 
respects rational, the result, as in most unequal alliances, 
is fatal to the weaker of the two. And accordingly there 
arises a new generation of moral zealots to insist on a third 
inference, there is no God — or object of worship — because 
the works, which must be his if he existed, are not good 
enough to make their author adorable. Idolatrous religions, 
or those in which the leading feature is the worship of a 
person, are naturally more exposed to this kind of assault 
than more abstract schemes, in which such associated 
religious feeling as exists is self-centred, and, instead of 
going out towards an external object, grows by the intensi- 
fication of its self-consciousness. A religion based, so to 
speak, on incident, is more easily believed in, and its 
observances kept up, than one which is only speculative 
and emotional, but it is also more easily believed in with 
superficial conviction and emotional unconcern, which 
really leaves it not religion at all, but common, matter-of- 
fact error. 

The natural classification of religions according to the 
comparative prominence of the subjective element would 
be of more importance but for the cross divisions which, 
in every special age or country, arise from the variations 
of personal temperament; men who are by nature born 
mystics inherit narratives and dogma, and those whose 



i68 



NATURAL LAW. 



natural taste is for the concrete find means of materialising 
the most hazy outlines of a national mysticism. Still the 
religion of a people is a tolerably sure index of the set of 
its strongest emotional tendencies, and in the days when 
no national creed claims adhesion as of course, the form of 
"belief to which individuals incline is an almost equally 
trustworthy symptom of mental and moral character. 

Dualism, express or implied, though it has a certain 
plausibility as an explanation of the imperfection and dis- 
cord apparent in the universe, is not compatible with the 
fullest development of the religious sentiment ; for, on the 
one hand, the tendency to glorify the good spirit, whose 
victory over the principle of evil is so obviously incom- 
plete, leads into theological dilemmas of the same sort as 
those just alluded to concerning the origin of evil, and on 
the other hand, the spontaneous feeling of men towards 
the Not-themselves is much weakened if this Not-self is 
conceived as divided into hostile fractions. Even if hatred 
were not a peculiarly irreligious sentiment, it would be 
found impossible to love one object and hate another at 
the same time with the same fervour as if all the powers 
of the mind were united in one direction. It is true that 
new religions always appear most thriving when in a 
militant condition, while persecution has the power of 
reviving a waning religious zeal, but the inference from 
this will be not so much that true religion requires the 
stimulus of opposition to keep up its vitality, as that the 
convictions of creeds and congregations which are kept 
alive by that stimulus do not constitute true religion. 
Any form of saintliness that requires the existence of a 
world of sinners to allow its full development or display, 
wastes away and perishes when an external conformity 
to the saintly type becomes the rule. But the relation 
between man and that which is Not-man is unchanging, 
and though man may not always be distinctly conscious 
of the relation, and though he may even be conscious of 
the relation without becoming conscious of any emotion 



RELIGION. 



169 



answering to it, the emotion, whenever it does make 
its way into consciousness, is as unchanging as the rela- 
tion, and as inaccessible to petty disturbance or casual 
interruption. 

Pantheism, considered merely in its negative form as 
maintaining the great World-Machine to be the Supreme 
Being because there is' nothing beyond or greater than 
it, is scarcely religious ; a vague sentiment of respect or 
admiration, as for something very great or powerful, does 
not control and subjugate the heart and will unless there 
is some intimate and (on one side) personal relation 
between the supreme power and the subject of religious 
emotion. In practice pantheism either stops short with a 
slight consecration of natural philosophy as a substitute 
for religion, or else its scientific character disappears, and 
the world as it is is deified and endowed with soul ; or 
again, the rational element is sacrificed to the emotional, 
and a result undistinguishable from that of mysticism is 
arrived at. 

Mysticism has at least one note of true religion, it is 
entirely subjective. A number of definite impressions are 
conveyed to the mind from without, from sources more or 
less distinct and separable, and these, meeting in conscious- 
ness, give rise to a special state of mind. Sometimes, and 
this often when the mental state is one of great gravity 
and earnestness, the subject may be more conscious of the 
general effect of all these influences than of their origin or 
of the natural and appropriate expression of the mood itself. 
When we are agitated by the confused consciousness of 
many things at once, we may either try to personify them, 
so that they may come more easily into consciousness, or 
we may try to lose ourselves in some larger percipient 
power, to merge our own rational consciousness in an in- 
articulate impressibility, an affectionate self-suppression, 
which is virtually an appeal to the not-self to round and 
complete by interpreting a relation so momentous as to 
overwhelm the frail personality of the mystic. 



NATURAL LAW. 



The intensity and character of a passion depends 
certainly upon the power of the subject for feeling in- 
tensely as well as upon the qualities of the object 
felt about, but the character of religious feeling, as the 
normal response of the human soul to the oum of non- 
human influences, is conditioned by the general nature 
of these influences, and furnishes in fact as it were, 
a reduced image, or echo of their tendency. From the 
standpoint of pure naturalism, that which men have 
worshipped as God appears either as the sum of natural 
tendencies in favour of good 1 — or, as Matthew Arnold calls 
it, the Not-ourselves making for righteousness — or else as 
the ideal construction which Feuerbach describes as the 
shadow of human feeling cast upon the universe. But 
both these are attempts at a quasi-reconciliation between 
theistic feeling and positive fact, and if speculation were 
making a fresh start unbiassed by former hypotheses, we 
should probably substitute for these formulae a double 
statement concerning the influence of the whole of natural 
existence upon man, and the feeling of man towards 
natural existence. 

In discussing the natural growth of human feelings of 
moral obligation, we have already had to recognise the 
existence of a kind of natural selection among the tenden- 
cies of individuals, which allows, in preference, those to 
survive which are conducive to the true good or perfection 
of things in general, because these are sustained, objec- 
tively by the tendency of other individuals towards their 
own several goods, and subjectively by the sympathy of 
kindred things with the same goal of natural good, while 
evil propensities are resisted at once by other evil, as well 
as by all good. The means for any action, of which the 
end is perfection, are normally subservient to the good or 
perfection of other things than the agent, and accordingly 

1 " Daher der Volker loblicher Gebrauch, 
Dass jeglicher das Beste, was er kenut, 
Er Gott, ja seinen Gott benennt." 



RELIGION. 



171 



moral action develops, and moral temperament inclndes 
a disposition to approve and sympathise with all the best 
tendencies in the natural world. These tendencies are 
not persons or entities, but they are perfectly natural 
and legitimate objects of feeling, and in proportion to 
the sensibility of men to those natural influences which 
"make for righteousness" will be their affection for 
the powers which have called and chosen them for 
the service of the Best, i.e., their religious reverence 
for the Supreme Not-self. The intensity of a passion 
depends upon the power of the subject for feeling in- 
tensely as well as upon the qualities of the object felt 
about ; but human feeling is, as a rule, conditioned by the 
permanent relations and qualities of things real, and it is 
certain that men and women have had real and strong 
feelings about and towards that which they call God. A 
rationalist would deny that any one ever loved his God 
more intensely than men and women have loved each 
other, and it may at least be maintained without offence 
that the strong and tender love of David and Jonathan is 
more religious than the affection of a modern rationalist 
for the Universum. We can fill in more or less clearly the 
steps by which all the normal human affections were de- 
veloped, and we can understand how, when developed and 
become part and parcel of the nature of a well-born man, 
they seek objects for themselves, and in case of need (sic 
vos non vobis) pour themselves out towards imaginary 
constructions, spiritual entities or abstract conceptions.' 
"We may argue that men have more power of reverenc- 
ing than any living man can fairly call forth by his real 
merits, that they have more power of loving than can be 
reasonably exercised upon the general scheme of crea- 
tion with its manifold unamiable imperfections ; still men 
and nature have made each man what he is, and he 
has no choice but to divide between man and nature all 
the outflow of religious sentiment which he can rationally 
entertain. Some natures have inherited through a fortu- 



172 



NATURAL LAW. 



nate set of spiritual antecedents almost infinite capa- 
bilities of tenderness and charm, but it does not follow 
that their personal history will be correspondingly happy, 
and that the material chances of life will bring the finest 
feelings within reach of ideal objects of devotion. The 
familiar forms of erotic mysticism, which are rightly con- 
demned as morbid, owe their existence to this combina- 
tion of a rationally conditioned besoin d' aimer with mate- 
rial restrictions on the reasonable indulgence of the want. 
Men argue that there must be a perfect God because 
they have feelings that suffer a painful check unless there 
is : they feel as if they could love infinitely and without 
reserve, and they cannot accept without a sense of sacri- 
fice the conditions under which alone this power of theirs 
can be exercised with unmixedly good result. It is easier 
to a loving nature to love, even though the object is 
unworthy, than to check the pleasant self-abandonment 
of affection by a just estimate of the moral qualities of 
the beloved ; but here also the pleasant and the good are 
not identical, and at the risk of appearing harsh, we 
should maintain that to love an evil thing well is not con- 
ducive to moral sanity. We do not say that the universe 
is evil, but there is evil in it, and without moral obtuse- 
ness or mental obliquity man cannot abandon himself to 
the rapturous adoration of creative power which assumes 
all its handiwork to be " very good." 

Eeligion, viewed from outside, might be described as 
the control exercised over men by their affection for the 
good ; viewed from within, it is the very affection for the 
good which controls them. The only difference between 
personal religion — as the term is generally understood — 
and private saint and hero worship, or even a sufficiently 
strong secular attachment, is that in the one case the 
controlling power or superiority which is recognised by 
affection, is a superiority to the subject in its own kind ; 
the object of regard is apprehended directly as a moral 
agent, and is capable of exercising a direct moral influence 



RELIGION. 



i/3 



by ordinary human means ; while in the other case of 
mystical religion, the mind has to supply from its own 
associations all that is moral in the sentiment with which 
it responds to the harmonious impression that it receives 
from the Not-self along a thousand unexplored channels. 
Why the response is naturally affectionate may be in- 
quired later if the point seems to call for more explanation 
than the naturally harmonious character of the conscious- 
ness of harmony. The issue between religion, theistic 
or otherwise, and positive irreligion or impiety, is vir- 
tually, whether this response of natural affection towards 
the sum of moral influences in the Not- man is rational or 
not, whether the inward bent of feeling should be resisted 
as well as the outer current of its direction controlled ? 
and it is hardly worth while to set up a man of straw, like 
the atheist of modern theologians, to argue in the face 
of fact that there is no good, and in the face of reason 
that men " ought " to be indifferent or adverse in their 
feelings towards what good there is. 

The question why, in merely personal affection, there 
should be a suggestion of religious infinitudes, belongs, how- 
ever, to this stage of the discussion, the rather that a satis- 
factory answer to it would almost amount to a verification 
of the rest of the theory. Science proceeds from the near 
to the remote, and if the strongest feeling of men for a 
known mistress is generically akin to their strongest feel- 
ing for the unknown God, the explanation of the more 
accessible phenomenon will go some way towards elucidat- 
ing the other. It has often been observed, amongst others 
by Eousseau, that the enthusiasm of devotion borrows the 
language of love, as the enthusiasm of love borrows the 
language of devotion ; and unless the language is out of 
place in one or other context, there must be some real 
similarity between the conditions which inspire its use. 

It is easy to be cynical concerning the physical basis of 
emotion, and every one of sound mind and sane morals 
with a normal physical constitution will sometimes observe 



174 



NATURAL LAW. 



in himself the working of an organic predisposition to feel, 
quite distinct from, and perhaps at variance with, the pre- 
sent suggestion of appropriate external stimuli. The so- 
called tesoin Maimer is an obvious illustration, but the 
remark applies equally to every form of ambition, cupidity, 
or attachment, in fact to every kind of relationship between 
the emotional self and its surroundings. The thrill of 
undefined, un motived aspiration which is so common in 
youth — and so commonly starved to death in maturity — 
is an inheritance of the same kind ; there is the developed 
desire and the latent ability to work towards ideal aims, 
only the ends are hidden and the openings blocked, and 
few have strength and insight to clear the path for them- 
selves. But when the subjective predisposition coincides 
with the external stimulus, there arises a vital sense of 
wellbeing, which it is unreasonable to scorn because of its 
composite antecedents. Those who are fortunate in their 
natural life glorify the physical basis for the sake of its 
spiritual developments ; those who are not fortunate depre- 
ciate the development by dwelling on the baseness of its 
origin ; while disinterested science places the goal of good 
neither at the begmning nor at the end, but in the har- 
mony of the whole process of development, whence the 
succeeding joys of natural life are born. 

And there are not two opinions in the human race as 
to which is the most intense and rapturous of these joys. 
The life of the world and the life of the individual go on 
side by side, but the supreme happiness of the individual 
is to feel his own life intensified, rounded, sustained, and 
sweetened by the spontaneous favour of that which is 
around and above him. It is not easy for ordinary minds 
to recognise their own most cherished experiences under 
the terms of an exact scientific description, and many who 
might be disposed to ridicule, as chill pedantry, Spinoza's 
definition of the divinest love, yet know no more intense 
feeling than that a gladness attended with the idea of an 
external cause " which they are as little able as he was to 



RELIGION, 



175 



analyse further. Liking may be reasonable, reducible to 
motive, just as obedience or resistance to the natural order 
of the world may be motived, but love and worship include 
too much to be themselves included in a phrase; the 
strongest motives may fail to call them forth, and when 
they have come into being they seem able to defy at least 
an apparent absence of motive for their persistence. What 
pleasure is to the senses or to the animal life, that love is 
to the imagination and the emotional life — an irreducible, 
final contentment of natural taste ; with this difference how- 
ever, whence perhaps our readiness to apply to the latter 
feeling alone, the epithet religious — that human beings 
delight in possessing the pleasures of their choice, and in 
being possessed by the love of their choice. 

The subjective element, which causes one person to be 
affected by one type of physical or moral beauty and 
another by a different or opposite type, leaves the bare 
common fact of affection unexplained, and we need seek 
no further motive for it than the acquired susceptibility of 
mankind. The utmost we can do is to find a quasi-rational 
basis for the inference which brings mind and will under 
subjection to the passions, when these have outrun know- 
ledge and experience in their intuition of the best. That 
love is the answer of the soul to the touch of the Infinite 
— or something more poetical to that effect — has been said 
so often by poets and philosophers that poets and philoso- 
phers in a critical and irreligious age begin to have a 
scruple about repeating the time-honoured sentiment. 
But if we suppose the mind to have acquired, in the course 
of continuously varying contact with things external to 
itself, the power and even a correlative inclination to re- 
ceive an indefinite number of heterogeneous impressions, 
it is evident that the strongest impressions of an infinite 
external existence to which the mind is likely to rise, 
would be given by the miscellaneous revival of all past 
harmonious impressions if it could be effected, rather than 
by a new concrete impression, however rich or agreeable. 



i 7 6 



NATURAL LAW. 



The conditions of the inward impression need not be re- 
produced, provided some indirect suggestion brings the 
consciousness round to a state answering to that which it 
would have left behind if objectively associated with every 
kind of welcome or exalted influence at once. 

But we are much too far from understanding even the 
ordinary relations between thought and feeling to have a 
right to be surprised at the discovery that it is often in the 
form of a human being, an Other-self, that the Not-self 
acts most compendiously, forcibly, and suggestively upon 
the consciousness of the self. From the remotest star dis- 
closed by the telescope to the strangest depths of joy or 
pain in human consciousness, whatever within the universe 
is, is felt, known, done, or believed, has an influence within 
the universe that may be gathered together with innumer- 
able others alike and different into the focus of conscious- 
ness of a single human brain. And if we suppose a mind, 
incapable of rising to a direct intuition of the Not-self as 
a moral force, to come in contact with another more richly 
endowed, more highly organised than itself, with, in fact, 
a human superior ; since new faculties can scarcely be im- 
provised for the occasion, it is natural to suppose that the 
influence of the superior mind or character will make itself 
felt by stimulating and reviving pre-existing faculties and 
susceptibilities. The self, seeing in the mirror of another 
consciousness as much of the still: larger Not-self as it is 
capable of being moved towards, comprehends the mirror 
and the reflection in one act of devout recognition, and 
thrills, according to its extremely finite capacity, with an 
Ahnung of the Infinite. 

Of course this account of the matter is slightly idealised; 
it has more in common with Plato's inspired friendship or 
Leopardi's " Son of the Celestial Venus" than with the 
loves of earthly men and women, but it explains the fact 
for which an explanation has long been sought, that a rest- 
less sense of liberated faculty and unappropriated emotion 
commonly attends the growth of any strong personal 



RELIGION. 



177 



attachment, and that both, failing other channels of ex- 
pression, exhaust themselves in representing the merits of 
the beloved in terms of universal perfection. That love 
and worship are practically indistinguishable when either 
reaches a given degree of intensity, is a fact which can 
only be taken as we find it, but the moral tendency of both 
moods is unmistakable ; while the latter normally begins 
with a recognition of superiority, the former presupposes 
a community of feeling which is in itself a step towards 
equality, and as the more complete the community, or 
sympathy, the more intense the love, it follows that per- 
fect equality between both lovers is the condition of 
worship which assumes the superiority of one, or, if the 
relation is absolutely ideal, of each at once to the other. 
But when the ideal is exalted as well as loved, the lover 
is drawn after in pursuit 1 of the purity or grandeur he 
has, it may be, dreamt into the image of the beloved, and 
analyse the process as cynically as we will, it remains 
true that character and conduct are gainers by all such 
visions of " the eternal marriage of love and duty." Of 
course the fraction of the JSTot-self which most people, even 
with this kind of assistance, are capable of apprehending, 
is humiliatingly small, but it is a further confirmation of 
our view that imperfectly or unequally developed natures 
naturally attach themselves to persons whose character is 
supplementary as well as sympathetic to their own, and 

1 So Petrarch to his love : — 

" Sai quel che per seguirti ho gia sofferto : 
E tu pur via di poggio in poggio sorgi 
Di giorno in giorno ; e di me non t' accorgi, 
Che son si stanco, e '1 sentir m' e tropp' erto. 
Ben vegg'io di lontano il dolce lume 
Ove per aspre vie mi sproni, e giri ; 
Ma non ho come tu, da volar piume." 

In this sonnet aspiration happens to break down into a touch of despair, 
but more often love, like faith, works the desired miracles— or causes them 
to be taken as worked. 

M 



i;8 



NATURAL LAW. 



can therefore interpret to them a part of existence that 
would otherwise escape their vision altogether. 

The attempt made in the present century by an emi- 
nent mathematician and philosopher to invent a religion 
without any supernatural assistance, has so much in com- 
mon with other attempts of the same kind that claim a 
higher origin, as to confirm the opinion that it is perman- 
ently natural to men to have some kind or other of religious 
faith and worship. Comte was much too positive a thinker 
to be seduced into pantheism, too rational to confound 
subject and object in mysticism. "With an ardour for 
intellectual system that in his works makes the organisa- 
tion of knowledge seem almost more of an end than its 
possession or use, the only entity superior to himself in the 
power of assimilating and digesting real knowledge whom he 
could recognise, was the human race, and for this being his 
rare powers of abstraction allowed him to feel a genuine 
sentiment of veneration, which rose to religious affection 
when the human race became associated in his medita- 
tions with the memory of a lady who had enriched his 
intuition of the Xot-self by striking a disused or silent 
chord in his emotional nature. But there are two reasons 
why the religion of humanity can hardly be expected to 
take the place of the other dogmatic religions with which 
it aims at competing. Positive thinkers would scarcely 
wish it to be professed with the unintelligent formalism 
with which the doctrines of older sects are held by the 
immense majority of their adherents, and it cannot be 
seriously expected that now. or for centuries to come, any 
considerable number of men, to say nothing of women, 
should have either the ideas or the instruction presupposed 
in a vital, personal conception of humanity as an organic 
whole, ageless and formless, with a life centred everywhere, 
a consciousness centred nowhere, and a growth conditioned 
— the religion does not say by what. Without such a con- 
ception the religion becomes an affair of empty phrases, 
altogether powerless to influence the conduct in the way 



RELIGION. 



179 



desired by its founder. With such a conception, no doubt, 
something of fresh, perhaps religious significance is added 
to the ordinary consciousness of life, as was done by the 
early Christian doctrines of communion and membership 
of the saints in Christ, while they rested upon the intui- 
tions of brotherly charity, not on an ecclesiastical tradi- 
tion. The Comtist calendar and the metaphysical doc- 
trine of " subjective immortality " are only ways of saying 
that our affections are independent of time and space, and 
that spiritual influences are undying in their effects. Most 
people have had at one time or another some private 
patron saint, alive or dead, who has been the object, per- 
haps all unconsciously, of as much fervent adoration as 
was ever directed towards canonised martyr, idol, or 
supreme spiritual power. Some have felt as if it were, so 
to speak, a personal favour to themselves that Socrates 
was wise, that St. Francis was poor, that Bayard was 
without fear and without reproach ; there is even some- 
thing religious in the way that the heart of a weary 
sceptic goes out towards Bruno, with affectionate envy to 
think that a man could be burnt for anything so certain 
as the Copernican system. A knowledge of the truth that 
some heroes, saints, and sages being dead yet speak, does 
naturally bring about a closer sense of the intellectual 
solidarity of the race, and does stimulate those who are 
yet alive in their turn to seek to say such words as they 
may be content to have survive them. The religion of the 
future, though it may dispense with a calendar and leave 
the celebration of centenaries to secular patriotism and 
enterprise, will always have to acknowledge a debt to 
Comte for having shown that the men of all times, as well 
as of all places, are held together by a tie of intellectual 
brotherhood which it is an element of intellectual strength 
for them to recognise. But the great Being, Humanity, 
however great our small powers will allow of our con- 
ceiving it to be, is still not supreme, and we do not find • 
in the past that men have been content knowingly to 



NATURAL LAW. 



worship " Ein Theil des Theils, der Anfangs alles war " — 
a single product of evolution, instead of all its absolute, 
infinite, irresponsible conditions. It was objected to dual- 
ism that the strength of the religious sentiment was much 
impaired by the conception of an internecine division 
between the powers of the Not-self, and the sentiment 
would probably disappear altogether if its natural object 
were that fraction of the Not-self which can scarcely be 
conceived as most powerful. Even at the present day, 
the former history of the race, though it may be one of 
the chief forces, is infinitely far from being the only force 
that moulds the life of a single man, and the arbitrary 
preference of one force out of the many upon which 
the individual consciously depends, is repugnant to the 
religious instinct which is always feeling its way towards 
a goal of absolute submission. Modern rationalists, like 
Strauss, who make religion consist in dependence upon 
the Universum, modern mystics, like Schleiermacher, 
who make it consist in the sense of dependence on 
the Unknown, and orthodox theologians, who place its 
essence in willing obedience to the Creator's will, — all 
represent the sentiment as possessing a kind of absolute, 
inevitable adaptation to its object which is wanting to 
the religion of humanity, unless it is allowed to borrow 
cogency from merely moral considerations. 

Perhaps truth is in some degree sacrificed to system 
when we attempt to keep the boundary line between 
morality and religion clearly marked ; but it holds true in 
general that morality is concerned with the conduct, reli- 
gion with the emotions; that morality consists in the con- 
sciousness of voluntary bondage, religion in the conscious- 
ness of a subjective release from all bondage. The moral 
precepts, which are obeyed by many, are not deduced from 
the religious sentiments, which are experienced by few ; 
but the connection long assumed to exist between morality 
and religion is not the less real because the order of it has 
been inverted, for it is by the acceptance of the most ab- 



RELIGION. 



181 



stract conclusions of morality that the mind is prepared 
to receive the intuitions of religion. The fruit of religious 
culture is a disposition to do the good without compul- 
sion, without inducement, by an instinct that does not 
stop to choose or reason, and on that very account is able 
to override the force of impeding motives. We act by 
reason and rational necessity ; we feel by instinct ; and 
our feeling will be sane if our habitual conduct is so ; and 
if our feeling is sane, all that we do under the influence of 
feeling will be right and good, and sometimes better than 
what could be suggested by any present reasonable motive. 
But it by no means follows from this estimate of religious 
feeling that feeling in general is the most trustworthy 
guide for conduct; it is only the rarefied, disinterested 
feeling which survives the discipline of moral life, with its 
lessons of renunciation and detachment, that can — and 
indeed must — be allowed supreme sway by those who 
have had grace to become its subjects. 

It was seen in the course of the preceding chapter how 
the disposition of the individual (human) organism to seek 
its own specific natural good is overruled by the fact that 
it is placed in a world the natural good of which requires 
sacrifices, on the part of some of its elements, akin to the 
partial sacrifices of inclination within the individual 
enjoined by its own moral nature. The problem of the 
individual, how to be good of its kind, is modified and 
complicated, because its kind includes the property of 
occupying such and such a place in the universe, for its 
natural good is then, of course, to fill that place in the 
best possible manner, which is the manner most conducive 
to the good of the universe, or the human race — after its 
kind. We must always be the first person in our own 
action; but as human sensibilities develop, we feel as 
well as know about things that do not directly concern 
ourselves. If our personal conduct is sufficiently upright 
to leave our judgment unbiassed in the appreciation of 
natural good, all this disinterested feeling and intelligence 



182 



NATURAL LAW. 



of the universal good gathers an amount of power which 
endures even when, for the moment, the universal good 
demands a special sacrifice ; and the habit of making such 
sacrifices without hesitation or regret is what we chiefly 
understand by religious perfection. 

It may not be very rational that when we find it to be 
practically impossible to arrange one life, our own, accord- 
ing to our taste, we should turn to the wider, and, as it 
might seem, more hopeless task of reforming the universe. 
Yet when the utter impossibility of leading a life of pure 
personal enjoyment has been empirically demonstrated, 
what can the disinterested judgment do but direct the 
will towards the realisation of what it holds to be the best 
possible world ? The irrepressible optimism of humanity 
comes back, though we drive it forth with the pitchfork 
of logical dilemma ; and many a pious soul, without re- 
pining or rebellious intention, seems virtually to say 
within itself : Since God has not made the best of all 
possible worlds, / will ! — and the world is the better, as 
much the better as material possibility allows, for the 
resolve. Of course even disinterested zeal may outrun 
discretion, and the passion for reforming creation, as long 
as any personal gratification mingles with its indulgence, 
is liable to be chilled by disappointment and the renewed 
discovery that, though our actions are in our own power, 
their consequences are not, so that even the good we would 
do may miss its aim. The triumph of disinterestedness, 
which also is moral and necessary, is to labour for the 
good of the world, even while believing that the labour is 
in vain, palliative and not remedial, that the world is bad 
at best, and that all our efforts can but save it from grow- 
ing worse than it must. 

This conception of duty as the active co-operation of the 
individual will with all the real forces of the universe, in 
proportion to their reality, may be objected to as visionary 
and over-abstract, as imposing so vast an obligation that 
a small human conscience will slip unbound through its 



RELIGION. 



183 



meshes — which, indeed, is what generally happens, unless 
the supreme religious influence of the general tendencies 
of the Not-self is felt, as a clear and present reality, not 
constraining or controlling the will, but absolutely trans- 
forming it, moulding it into acquiescence and conformity 
with all that exists. 

At this point the sceptical reader will probably require 
all the patience and tolerance of which he may be capable. 
" Except a man be born again, he cannot enter into the 
kingdom of God." J onathan Edwards, and half Christen- 
dom with him, repeats, " Without a change of nature, 
men's practice will not be thoroughly changed ; " and the 
philosophy of the change upon which the New England 
divine insists, is expounded with great beauty and profun- 
dity by a representative of the other half of Christendom, 
St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa's contemporary and friend, 
in two treatises of mystical theology, called " The Ascent 
of Mount Carmel " and " The Obscure Night of the Soul," 
by the study of which the curious may convince them- 
selves that the disagreement of Christian sects is less 
radical than they themselves endeavour to believe. Not 
to multiply examples, the conversion of Tauler by the 
man Nicholas of Basle, the final awakening of Fraulein 
von Klettenberg, recorded with Goethe's usual sympathetic 
realism in " Wilhelm Meister," the new birth of the Cal- 
vinists, Mill's reconstruction of his hereditary creed, St. 
John's "Night of the Soul," are all phases of the same 
natural and intelligible revolution in the feelings which 
follows upon the apprehension of a new truth of vital 
importance, or more commonly, upon some moral crisis 
which causes an old belief suddenly to acquire fresh force 
and significance. 1 

1 The suddenness of an illumination of this kind is no argument for its 
supernatural origin. " Two mathematicians of good repute, both as stu- 
dents and teachers, were referring " — writes Mr. Todhunter in his " Con- 
flict of the Studies " — " to the difficulties which perplex beginners in the 
Differential Calculus ; they agreed in stating that, after groping in the 



NATURAL LAW. 



If we suppose that the thoughts of men do not spring 
uncaused into lawless activity, but are conditioned by 
the orderly relations of real existence, it is intelligible 
that the full effect of a number of connected external 
influences should remain in abeyance so long as any of 
them had failed to convey its appropriate impression, 
but the co-ordination of the impressions follows of itself, 
too instantaneously to be traced, when the last has been 
received. A new idea passes the threshold of conscious- 
ness at a bound, but the unconscious preparation of the 
brain for its reception must be reckoned among its pre- 
mises. And in the same way the sudden revulsion of 
feeling which may result in a permanent alteration of the 
character, is itself gradually prepared by successive expe- 
riences, not by any means necessarily suggestive, to the 
judgment of common sense, of their actual emotional 
contre-coup. 

All our authorities agree as to the preliminary steps in 
this spiritual revolution. The certainty that out of all the 
personal desires entertained by the natural man, an un- 
known, fixed, and probably large proportion are inevitably 
doomed to disappointment, does as a fact tend to produce 
a degree of what Catholics call " detachment " from all, 
even the most realisable personal aims. Merely morbid 
asceticism might be compared to the sick distaste for food 
of a man on the verge of starvation; those to whom 
healthy pleasures are unknown may set themselves to 
crush their natural appetites rather than endure the sense 
of unsatisfied longing, and if they try to make their own 
privation into a rule for others, the rule is false as well as 
ungenial. But, taking the world as it is, no character is 
complete that cannot survive the potential injuries of for- 
tune ; and the power of doing without a valued good, if 
kept alive without enforced exercise, is tribute enough to 

dark for some time, light had. suddenly appeared, and both regretted 
that, in spite of many efforts made for the purpose, they could not recol- 
lect more than this general outline." 



RELIGION. 



185 



the insecurity of human happiness. A living sense of this 
insecurity is the first step towards escape from the stupid 
animal dependence, which is really irreligious, on the 
natural gifts of fortune. Persons of much moral scrupu- 
lousness, whose private desires have proved persistently 
unrealisable, are tempted to expend the energy thus libe- 
rated from the service of appetite in the discharge of all 
the duties they can discover or invent ; but as their powers 
of doing good are after all finite, and the evil in the world 
practically infinite, the saint, while still under the law, is 
oppressed by a deep and painful sense of shortcoming and 
depravity, as nearly as may be proportionate to the real 
excellence and purity of his moral disposition. The 
" conviction of sin " experienced by persons whose moral 
virtues would stock a regiment of lay philosophers, may 
be explained as the despair and self-abasement produced 
by the discovery that even the virtuous impulses of the 
natural man do not certainly lead their followers to perfect 
content, or have not force enough to create anew the 
world which, to natural virtue, seems painfully, intoler- 
ably imperfect. Their general disposition was towards 
what they regarded as good, but particular sacrifices or 
discrepancies between the possible and the desired were 
felt as vexatious, and the vexation appeared sinful, as it 
was accompanied by a general impression that the will of 
the individual ought to assent to whatever was ordered 
by the supreme divine will. The attempt to reform the 
world with the help of radically imperfect, finite, human 
resources naturally fails, and a very vivid perception of 
the extent of the failure serves as a Nemesis to chasten 
the spiritual pride or egotism which could conceive such 
an ambition. 

St. J ohn of the Cross, who treats the subject more intel- 
lectually than the Calvinists, represents the obscure night 
of the soul as a season of complete mental prostration, 
when all the faculties have been tried and found wanting 
to effect " a perfect and permanent union in the substance 



i86 



NATURAL LAW. 



of the soul and its powers." This union or presence of 
God in the order of nature (we are still paraphrasing the 
saint) subsists between him and all his creatures, but 
there is a supernatural union which takes effect when two 
wills — the will of God and the will of the soul — are con- 
formed together, neither desiring aught repugnant to the 
other. The soul not being naturally altogether one with 
God, best attains to this union by being, except for a loving 
disposition towards assent, altogether blank and colourless. 
The assent itself (like the illumination of the mathemati- 
cians) is seldom or never produced by any one rational 
consideration ; a mass of, as it were, cumulative evidence, 
of cognate impressions, result at a particular moment in 
producing the conviction which is complete and effectual 
as soon as it exists at all. All previously received impres- 
sions and beliefs remain the same, but coloured and inten- 
sified by the sense of their connection and all-sufhciency. 
Eeligious writers insist that there is a fundamental trans- 
formation of the will and character, and it seems that the 
only possible change we can suppose to have occurred, 
when nothing else is changed in the man, and nothing at 
all in the perceivable universe, is a change either in his 
apprehension of the relation subsisting between the two, 
or a change in the sentiment with which he is affected 
by the relation as apprehended — in practice the change 
from a hostile to a friendly disposition towards the real 
order of the universe. It is the birth of love, the sponta- 
neous opening of the heart to a new affection of loyal 
devotion, and the affection is as real and irresistible as the 
personality of its object may be dubious. The change of 
heart by which the saints felt themselves released at once 
from the bondage of natural iniquity and of the law of 
natural morality, may be described as the discovery by a 
soul that had been out of harmony with its surroundings, 
that harmony, though not happiness, is possible — at a 
price ; that though the self cannot remodel the universe in 
conformity to its own best impulses, all its own best im- 



RELIGION. 



187 



pulses can find scope and satisfaction in conformity with 
true tendencies in the Not-self. Whichever way the change 
is, the harmony between the soul and its surrounding is 
preceded, or perhaps rather effected, by a harmonious 
consensus of all the faculties, which, as under the influence 
of the Platonic love, become the more vigorous and active 
for their agreement. Such an Aufklarung may be gradual, 
as in the case of Goethe, whose whole life was spent in 
being savingly converted from the dominion of his strong 
passions. It is absent altogether from the lives of many 
even able thinkers who have always been more possessed 
by the positive aspect of their convictions than by diffi- 
culties arising from the relation between them, or from the 
coexistence of seemingly in consistent convictions ; and 
to some it is disguised by association with some simple 
step in their speculative education, with the first appre- 
hension of a pregnant doctrine, or the final adhesion to an 
impressive system, events that, of course, are only epoch- 
making in a life chiefly spent in theorising. 

Pure science and unreflective action never bring the 
mind to the religious conviction of its own impotence, 
which follows from the application of knowledge to conduct, 
or the attempt to act by reason only, and to give a rational 
explanation of the impulses followed instinctively. The 
ascetic discipline which aims at " suppressing desire, even 
though possession remain," is based upon the experimental 
discovery that particular attachments impair the general 
freedom of the soul to follow what it apprehends as divine 
perfection. The most trustworthy judgments are the most 
dispassionate and disinterested, and so it is true, as St. John 
says, that the perfect man first acquires in this detachment 
from creatures a clear comprehension of them. Eationalists 
of course will say that the capacity or nature of the soul 
fixes and limits that which it will apprehend as divine 
perfection — the Saint himself, for instance, apprehends an 
All that is merely moral and intellectual, and not so sub- 
ject to law as to be exactly cognoscible ; — but this does not 



i88 



NATURAL LAW. 



affect the main point, that general perfection and particular 
appetites are distinct and frequently incompatible. " When 
thou dwellest upon anything, thou hast ceased to cast thy- 
self upon the All." Even a tyrannical desire to impose 
upon the Universe conduct which the individual believes 
to be for its true good is irreligious, unless the ideal has 
been received from the Not-self as expressive of its real 
tendencies. Quite in the manner of Spinoza — whom a 
sound popular instinct has always refused to regard as 
in any intelligible sense a theist — St. John of the Cross 
proceeds: "The end of meditation and reflection on the 
things of God is to elicit the knowledge and love of him. 
Each time the soul elicits this, it is an act, and as acts, 
often repeated, produce habits, so may acts of loving know- 
ledge continuously elicited by the soul beget the habit 
thereof in the course of time." It is remarkable that with 
a large experience of professed " religious," at a time of 
religious revival, he repeatedly insists that there are very, 
very few to whom it is given to reach the last stage of 
spiritual perfection, in which the truths of religion are 
conceived as the impression made by the All upon the 
chastened receptive spirit. Such disinterested cognition, 
if it were possible, would doubtless impart the highest, 
most abstract truth, even though we suppose it to be still 
received by merely human faculties ; it is as natural and 
conceivable for the mind to have a true intuition of the uni- 
versal as of the particular, for both are in a way external to 
consciousness, neither its merely arbitrary creation, though 
reasoning may have to be suspended as well as sense and 
passion, because the subject is too wide for it until the 
intuition is complete, when it represents the individual as 
belonging not to itself to be made the best of for its own 
sake, but to the world, to be made what use of it can, even 
though, as the stern realism of the Calvinists saw some- 
times befell, it be elected to serve the All by its perdition. 

The order of the Universe does not appear to the natural 
reason of man to be so good that we should co-operate in 



RELIGION. 



its "purposes" of our own accord, by choice, unless we 
must. But of all necessities, this is the most indefeasible, 
while we live we co-operate, when we die our salts and 
phosphates go on co-operating, and the influence of our 
actions is immortal. The human will cannot change the 
past, but it is one of the natural forces that regulate the 
future, and it does so according to its apprehension of the 
present, which is coloured by the sympathies born of a hard 
experience. The world is the saints', not to possess, but 
to mend, or at least to alter, and in altering they still co- 
operate with the " stream of tendency" which has brought 
to pass that just this generation affirms such and such 
alterations to be good. The sense of a common misfortune, 
if life is all calamity, of a common interest in one work, if 
the race is on the whole not ill-content to go on discharg- 
ing its natural functions in the scheme of the universe, 
may no doubt contribute something of religious spontaneity 
to the life of the social organism by leading men to spare 
each other and themselves the gratuitous addition to their 
troubles of destructive rivalry and internecine strife. There 
were three Christian graces, " and the greatest of these is 
Charity"— whose existence has the guarantee of necessity, 
though faith and hope, the pretty parasites of imperfect 
knowledge, were to vanish in the fuller light of science 
from a world of realists who would rather see than imagine, 
and rather be strong to bear what they see than dazzle 
their eyes with looking into a visionary future. For our- 
selves certainly, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, 
which makes it probable that all the best energies of most 
of us will no more than suffice to ensure that the world 
shall not be the worse for our co-operation, that we have 
not caused more suffering than we have eased, exacted 
more service than we have rendered, devoured more of the 
common patrimony than our labour has replaced. ISTo one 
would willingly live, die, and leave no sign but a little 
addition to the mass of human misery, and the danger 
seems nearer to us than when we believed. The material 



190 



NATURAL LAW. 



evil in the world, which men are but little concerned in 
producing, may "be the condition of human progress, and 
the progress of the kind is its own good, but not Omnipo- 
tence itself could cause that good should ever come out of 
what we call moral evil, except always at the cost of greater 
good lost. It is because moral evil exists that the Creator 
of the Universe — if a Universe could have a Creator — 
could not be esteemed a moral agent. 

Piety towards the Universe is the result of a mighty syn- 
thesis, towards which moral generalities take us but little 
way. It is not a moral duty to feel an affection for the 
solar and the stellar systems, to wax enthusiastic over the 
properties of space or to admire the circuitous processes in 
the evolution of life. The emotions are free ; but it is cer- 
tainly a misfortune, and probably an imperfection, to have 
so little sympathy with the natural order of which we form 
a part as to take no pleasure in its comparatively success- 
ful achievements, and to feel only unhelpful concern when, 
as but too often happens, evolution halts and limps, law is 
burdensome, progress imperceptible, and though the poor 
world may be doing her best, we yet can scarcely persuade 
ourselves that her best is " very good." But exactly at 
this point we have a fellow-feeling that must end in cha- 
ritable indulgence; "the whole creation groaneth and 
travaileth together," and perhaps the solar system is as 
near being good after its kind as mortal astronomers and 
critics after theirs; at least it bears its aberrations in digni- 
fied silence, which the puling tribe of pessimists might do 
well to imitate. 

The natural relation of man to the Universe is one of 
dependence, and the immense majority of men are so sim- 
ply and unreflectingly a part of the general order in which 
they live and move and have their being, that it does not 
occur to them to cavil or rebel against it ; their co-opera- 
tion is spontaneous, but too unemotional to be called reli- 
gious. It might be argued that such a healthy state of 
nature was preferable to the state of grace which we have 



RELIGION. 191 

been endeavouring to comprehend. Unintelligent co-opera- 
tion has its drawbacks, bnt it may be doubted whether the 
mind is really strengthened by anything so abstract as 
considerations concerning the manner in which the sacri- 
fices imposed by the co-operation are made necessary. But 
when the necessity has once been questioned, since it does 
not therefore cease to exist, the mind must follow its natural 
course if the primitive consensus is ever to be restored upon 
a surer foundation. When the attempt of the individual to 
dominate the world, to make it and its inhabitants the tools 
of private ends and objects, is given up as impracticable, 
the antagonism between the self and the Not-self ceases, 
and the will is reconciled. It becomes conscious of the 
tendency, not its own, which has made it, and as will, to 
our knowledge, is only conscious tendency, this is the very 
identification of the single will with the tendency of the 
All that is the note of true religion. 

The emotion accompanying this acquiescence of the will is 
one of not untender loyalty. Ancient prophets and modern 
preachers have tried to enlist the same feeling by calling 
on a generous congregation to come " to the help of the 
Lord, to the help of the Lord against the mighty." But 
the Lord of hosts, we feel, could fight his own battles. 
The universe really needs our help to make itself as good 
as it can, and it is to the influence of the universe that we 
owe whatever power or will we have to co-operate in what 
we judge to be its true tendencies. We are " a part of its 
involuntary, palpitating life," and if we are not with it, we 
are against it. Those in whom these natural influences at 
times call forth the emotional response which makes the 
inevitable co-operation seem spontaneous and easy, do not 
therefore live for ever after in a religious trance. The 
attempt to reproduce an intense feeling of the solidarity 
of all existence, when it does not naturally present itself, 
is a waste of good volitional force. No doubt when the 
religious emotion fails, the burden of moral duty and the 



192 



NATURAL LAW. 



consciousness of. moral and natural imperfection becomes 
again oppressive ; but the universe does not exist for the 
sake of satisfying the religious instincts of mankind, and 
reason shows that the surest way of preserving the fading 
sense of harmony between the soul and nature is to make 
the harmony the more complete, to keep the soul at- 
tuned to the tendencies of the Not-self by constant action 
in obedience to its leadings. 

Deus sive Natura — as Spinoza calls the whole of real 
Being — is not an evil genius ; it is a vast system that lives 
and prospers in proportion as the strength of its various 
elements can be brought into alliance, and form mutually 
sustaining relations. There is good enough in the world 
to stir the affections of those who see it all, and those 
whose life is spent in active self-identification with all 
the powers of the universe for good, waste least time in 
reflecting upon the evil which they are constantly, as it 
were, leaving behind them. Even if we could persuade 
ourselves that what is highest and best in man is not his 
own, not our veritable nature, but a loan, a foreshadowing 
of something quite outside ourself and our world, the good 
in this world would still be neither more nor less ; and it 
would in like manner be neither more nor less even though 
theologians should discover that they had made mistakes 
about that other world, concerning which they candidly 
admit themselves to have no direct knowledge. Philo- 
sophy can no more make morality easy than surgery can 
make diseases wholesome, but it certainly does nothing 
to shake the religious affection of men for that which they 
naturally believe to be the chief of all earthly goods, the 
goodness of men and women : tender strength, generous 
forbearance, disinterested wisdom, and passionate love are 
good — no true believer in the unknown God, ignorantly 
worshipped by divers names, will dare to doubt it — and 
no one who has known and felt for himself that they are 
good can think that the world in which they are to be 



RELIGION. 



193 



found, enjoyed, and increased is quite a howling wilder- 
ness, though it be only our world, and not an antechamber 
to heaven or hell. 

One point remains to be considered. Eeligion is natu- 
ral, and in the main always the same, that is to say, a 
spirit of devout and affectionate acquiescence in the will 
of a superior power ; but we may ask, is the existence 
and strength of this sentiment equally natural and equally 
necessary to moral and natural perfection in all genera- 
tions, or is there any natural excuse or justification for 
the temper of an irreligious age ? Is the strength of the 
religious sentiment an essential part of that natural per- 
fection which we conceive to be the summum bonum ? Is 
a Christian, with a strong sense of piety towards the un- 
seen powers of the Not-self, humanly speaking, better than 
an atheist, who judges the universe to be too imperfect 
after its kind to call forth feelings of religious devotion or 
love ? In a word, is irreligion a moral defect in man ? 

This is a practical question, which should offer little 
difficulty if we were clear both as to our facts and our 
principles. The natural good of man consists in the 
abundance of active and perceptive powers ; moral good 
consists in the deliberate and disinterested pursuit of 
natural good, quand meme the pursuit is naturally hard ; 
civilised religion is the loving worship of the strongest 
power known as Not-self, when this power is exerted in 
behalf of moral good, i.e., of man's pursuit of natural good 
quand meme. Now it is a question of fact whether the 
stream of natural tendency is always equally helpful to 
the moral struggles of individuals in each generation, 
and it is a further question of fact, whether men are at 
all times equally well aware of the real extent of the help 
thus given to them. In tracing the history of morality, 
we found that morality was easy when ideals were sta- 
tionary, and difficult when they were progressive. Of 
course ease and difficulty are terms relating to human con- 
sciousness, and to feel a difficulty more, even if it continues 

If 



194 



NATURAL LAW. 



objectively of the same size, is really to be less helped, by 
things in general, to overcome it, than is the case when 
the difficulty is less felt. Therefore piety is more natural, 
and rests on more reasonable grounds, in ages when the 
powers and desires are pretty accurately balanced, than 
in periods of transition, when the aspirations have outrun 
the faculties, or the faculties have fallen off from the stan- 
dard which contented earlier aspirations. Now it cannot 
be a part of man's perfection to cherish illusions concern- 
ing his relations to the Not-self, and at times when the 
course of nature does not make high virtue easy to any 
one, unreserved piety towards the natural order or its 
author argues a mind contented with less than the highest 
virtue, i.e., naturally imperfect. The optimism of philoso- 
phers and divines in the eighteenth century, when content 
with low ideals was general, might serve as an illustration. 

The religion of a critical, progressive age is more com- 
plicated, intellectual, and disinterested, but it is less de- 
vout and less personal than that of simpler, more primitive 
times. We recognise the force of the moral obligations 
which the whole past of mankind unites in causing us to 
recognise, we share the ideas and aspirations correlative 
to our feeling of obligation, and without any unpractical 
fatalism, we see that the weakness as well as the strength 
of what we hold to be best in our moral nature is the pro- 
duct of natural causes, before which we were, literally, 
helpless as the unborn babe, but this consciousness in no 
way affects the fully developed moral sentiments of our 
maturity. In dispassionately recognising the responsi- 
bility of the past for having lived so indifferently that we, 
its heirs, are no better than we should be, we do not lose 
sight of our inherited conviction that it is best to be as 
good as we can ; and as the strength as well as the weak- 
ness of our better nature is conditioned by past and pre- 
sent modifications of the Not-self, if on the whole our 
strength is greater than our weakness, we feel that " the 
Lord is on our side," that the stream of tendency is with 



RELIGION. 



195 



us, that we are with it, a part of it, and that the current 
of human affairs sets the stronger in the direction of pre- 
destined progress for being reinforced by all the power of 
our intelligent will. Thus to a thoroughly healthy and 
energetic nature, impiety is an impossibility, a self-con- 
tradiction, for if moral good consists in the struggle after 
an attainable Better, the universe which has imparted 
strength for the struggle, cannot be felt as bad. 

To some minds with an irresistible craving after peace 
and the mental rest of an absolute attachment, this will 
seem enough to warrant positive thinkers in transferring 
to the Universe the affection felt by Theists for the object 
of their worship, and it is by no means needful to argue 
away any spontaneous enthusiasm or tenderness with which 
enthusiastic or tender souls may be affected towards the 
natural order of the world ; if the feeling exists it is because 
the elements proper to elicit it have a real existence also, 
and it is not necessary (or possible) for every one to have 
the feeling appropriate to the fullest knowledge of the con- 
ditions of our natural and spiritual being. But, on the 
other hand, it is neither necessary nor desirable for those 
who have a clear and adequate idea of these conditions to 
argue themselves into stronger feelings of devotion than 
are spontaneous. The complete harmony between all the 
powers of the mind — which makes religious enthusiasm 
possible — is a good ; and if we were content with a merely 
subjective standard of good, such as happiness or content, 
it might seem the supreme good, so that religious teachers 
might agree with Utilitarians (as indeed they often have) 
in urging men to restrain those unruly desires and impulses 
which are not predestined to full present gratification, and 
therefore perpetuate the irreligious temper of partial re- 
bellion against that which is. But if our standard o, 
perfection is progressive, and includes the maximum of 
objective relations between the self, society, and nature, 
the harmony of the moral energies, which gives religious 
peace, will no more appear to be the supreme end of our 



196 



NATURAL LAW. 



being than the harmony of our natural powers, which gives 
sensible pleasure. The harmony is a good, only attainable 
by those who are, naturally or morally, good of their kind • 
but the discord of one generation may be richer than the 
harmony of another, and the true test of comparison is to 
judge whether the irreligious age has so much more of 
other positive good in it as to compensate for the mis- 
fortune of irregular, unequal development among its 
various elements. 

This is only one more variation on the familiar theme 
that the possession of good and the enjoyment of good are 
not naturally identical. The individual is not always 
pleasurably conscious of the sympathy which exists between 
himself and the outer world ; he may be most painfully 
conscious of an imperfect sympathy, which is as different 
from antipathy as a lovers' quarrel is from dislike. The 
victim of this unfortunate state is objectively more nearly 
at one with the external order than if he had narrower 
sympathies and no wishes or ideas beyond them. Eeligious 
blessedness consists in the pleasurable consciousness of the 
maximum of real sympathy with the moral tendencies of 
the Xot-self, religious perfection in the maximum of such 
sympathy qiiand meme it is not complete enough for en- 
joyment; and if this be so, it is clear that men may 
approach to religious excellence without possessing the 
moral self-satisfaction called religious peace, as they may 
approach to moral excellence without possessing the 
physical self-satisfaction known as natural pleasure or 
happiness. 

Of course it is open to any one to say that they do not 
mean by secular or religious happiness what we have here 
offered as the definition of those words, but if so we have 
a right to ask for an alternative definition which shall in- 
clude a greater number of the marks which we know belong 
to the things defined. It will be said that the essence of 
religion is perfect faith and trust in God, that if there is 
no God, there can be no religion, that there is a God, and 



RELIGION. 



197 



that therefore those who wrongly believe that there is none, 
are by their own wrong-doing left without religion. "We 
do not attempt to argue with persons of strong religious 
feeling, whose feeling is associated with an equally strong 
conviction of the truth of some theistic dogma ; we address 
ourselves rather to the many persons of undetermined 
views, to whom the chief argument for the existence of a 
deity is that men have generally believed in one or more, 
and who rather believe themselves to have the same belief 
as their neighbours than possess any intimate " saving " 
sense of its truth. To these we submit the/ following 
considerations as a ground for transferring their languid 
adhesion from one body of believers to another. 

Men naturally have feelings answering to the sum of 
impressions made on them by the moral aspects of the 
Not-self, i.e., by the Not-self in its relations to their moral 
life; the impression produced by a cause only known 
through this impression calls forth a feeling about — or 
towards — the cause, and men do not naturally and at once 
distinguish between simple and multiple causes of simple 
and multiple effects. The act of will of a given person 
may have many consequences, and human feelings towards 
the agent vary — even more than is strictly reasonable — in 
accordance with the result of his act ; because his act is 
the sine qua non of the event, all the other conditions 
which helped to determine its character are left out of 
sight; and conversely, if a variety of acts and accidents 
contribute equally to produce an effect that affects us as 
one, we naturally feel as if all the co-operating forces were 
somehow connected, made one, for its production ; they are 
involuntarily, as it were instinctively, identified in the 
mind ; by a kind of synthesis of the imagination, what is 
felt as one is supposed to act as one, and is then felt 
towards as if it acted with a real individuality, and were 
personally responsible to us for the feelings and the 
emotions which it calls up in us. 

Thus it is that men have come to have strong and in- 



NATURAL LAW. 



tense feelings towards beings that are the creation of their 
own imagination — as entities, though there are realities to 
which the feelings are due. But we have to distinguish 
between the religion which consists mainly in sentiments 
towards the Not- self, and the religious temper which is 
wholly subjective, and consciously so. Atheistical religion 
consists of religious faith, zeal, and love, without an object 
of worship. We have not deliberately chosen a definition 
of religion which should include the development of a 
sentiment without external object ; but we cannot justify 
the existence of the religious sentiment with a supposed 
object, except by reasoning which serves equally well to 
explain its existence when criticism has shown the sup- 
posed object to be a thing of the mind. 

Like all other sincere religion, atheistical religion has 
two parts, the intense inward feeling and the outward 
yearning or aspiration, both different phases of one mental 
state, that is, of a state with identical past and indivisible 
future. The inward feeling, which Spinoza calls acquies- 
cence, is the consciousness of harmony in all the higher 
powers of the soul, which is only attainable, at least with 
fully developed consciousness, when the soul is in harmony 
with its objective surroundings, and this is a state of pas- 
sive, exalted beatitude; it is a grateful consciousness of 
what the soul is in relation to the Not-self, i.e., a partici- 
pator in its best and strongest tendencies; not — if the 
reader will have patience with such subtleties — a con- 
sciousness of the participation, but a general sense of peace 
and wellbeing, which proves on examination to be the 
result of this harmonious participation. 

The spiritual reward of religious perfection may not 
always be equally accessible, but the alternative, if it fails, 
is not impiety, only a different manifestation of the re- 
ligious spirit, active instead of contemplative. Supposing 
the maximum of objective sympathy between the individual 
and the natural tendencies of his age to be positively and 
comparatively small, he may be painfully conscious of dis- 



RELIGION. 



199 



crepancy between the aspirations and the achievement of 
himself and his best contemporaries, but the aspirations 
after perfection are to the full as natural as the imperfect 
achievement, and either way of approaching to the desired 
sympathy is good. If circumstances trace a possible and 
satisfying ideal, the religious duty of the soul will be 
obedience, but if, on the contrary, the environment appears 
in consciousness as a check, a hindrance to the perfection 
of the soul, then obedience is time-serving and not religious ; 
and though it may be said, with truth, that rebellion 
against some existing realities may be an act of obedience 
to the highest spiritual influences of the Not-self, which 
are at least equally real, still it is naturally impossible for 
acts of an opposite kind to be performed in the same spirit 
even though they have the one element of dutifulness in 
common: and to feeling no two attitudes can be more 
unlike than that of resisting and yielding to the nearest 
external tendency. 

The distinction which we should be inclined to draw 
between the religious spirit of a critical or progressive age 
and one contentedly stationary is only this. In what are 
called the ages of faith, men live by sight, in sight of realised 
ideals, satisfying objects of worship exist for them. In 
what are called ages of unbelief, men must live, if they 
are to have any spiritual life at all, by faith in unseen 
ideals, and for them idolatry or the worship of anything 
that is known or clearly imaginable is a sin against the 
spirit of perfection. The works of the spirit are always the 
same, or at least always alike, but man's relation to the 
spiritual influences of the natural world and his conscious 
affection towards them may vary. Hence it is that religion 
takes different forms, and those who look for it in the 
costume of three or five centuries ago may fail to recognise 
it in its contemporary garb. Nevertheless religious minds 
at the present day are as far as ever from being content to 
think that the truth is only a fiction agreed upon, and that 
the future may agree upon a lie. Our premises do not 



200 



NATURAL LAW. 



compel us to accept as a natural law, a necessity following 
from the nature of tilings, the tendency which we observe 
in human beliefs to oscillate from prejudice to denial, and 
from the criticism of one error to the construction of 
another. We may have a just sense of past compulsion 
and present instigation without disguising our ignorance of 
what lies in front of us or pretending to limit the future to 
conformity with our theories ; and yet we want a theory 
of theories to bind together every age and make our faith 
reasonable. We have not to attain the ideal of a thousand 
years hence, or of a thousand years ago ; we have ideals 
now, though most of us are ashamed to own it, and it is the 
ideal of to-day that we have to pursue with religious faith 
and zeal. The summum honum is the best possible growth, • 
and the perfection to be sought in every age is the best 
growth of human power and sensibility possible to that 
age, and we know no formula that serves better than this 
to justify the perpetual pursuit of a changing goal, which 
seems to be the condition of healthy life. 

But, it will perhaps be said, if there is nothing better in 
rerum natura than the noblest of living men or women, 
what have they to aspire after ? If there is no God hold- 
ing an ideal in front of them, to which it is their duty to 
be conformed, what sense is there in the passionate struggle 
after ideals, which no one will go to hell for not reaching, 
which no one can reach, which no one will go to heaven 
for endeavouring to reach ? In this way the advocatus 
diaboli describes the never-ending circle of objection : what 
motives have we for acting in accordance with natural 
causes ? what causes us to follow natural motives ? Why 
— meaning for what motive or inducement — are we reason- 
able, law-keeping creatures ? Why — still meaning for what 
motive — are we moved by other inducements than the 
promise of reward, temporal or eternal ? and again, when 
reason good has been shown in the natural history of our 
susceptibilities for the existence of disinterested emotions 
and aspirations, Why — meaning for what cause — are we 



RELIGION. 



20I 



led by this or that motive, which we are not conscious of 
any reason for following except that we are spontaneously 
moved to do so ? 

In the ordinary transactions of life, the " why " of con- 
duct and feeling admits of being indefinitely put off, one 
reason after another may be alleged, while leaving us as 
far as ever from the ultimate root of things. It is only 
when we have forced ourselves to the highest generalisa- 
tion of all that it becomes impossible to shirk the question 
in its most trying form. Do we — do I the thinker — feel 
at this present moment in my inmost soul that I have 
sufficient reasons and irresistible motives for doing that 
which the stream of natural causation, culminating in my 
will and actual circumstances, has determined me to do ? 
Put in this form the question answers itself, but in many 
minds at the present day there is latent an. uneasy doubt 
as to whether — not now for themselves, but in general for 
everybody — natural causes can be trusted to supply 
efficient motives for the choice of right action. One of 
the many attractions of theism is that its adherents, when 
they do not really feel as if they had sufficient reasons 
or motives for being or doing their best, can nevertheless 
turn the scale in theory by supposing real but inadequate 
motives to be reinforced at need by contributions from the 
vaguely imagined infinitudes of supernatural sanction. As 
Mephistopheles observes : " An Worte lasst sich trefflich 
glauben; " and the mere name of a deliverer affords spiritual 
consolation, if not practical help. But it is becoming 
increasingly hard to believe in false gods, while the moral 
and spiritual nature of many is craving for a believable 
truth ; and if God is only a name for " the Best we know," 
the sooner we learn not to trust in names, but to attach 
ourselves to the Eeal Best, the better for our spiritual 
welfare. 

The natural history of morality accounts for the sense 
of obligation in particular cases, for the fact that when 
men have to choose between right and wrong, they feel 



202 



NATURAL LAW. 



more or less bound to prefer the right. But even those 
who accept this naturalistic explanation of the simple 
precepts of the moral law, often speak as if some furthei 
supernatural power were required to explain why men 
should prefer an abstract right, so as to go out of their 
way to imagine duties not sensibly imposed by circum- 
stances ; why they should love the right for its own sake, 
and instead of following the lead of circumstances, seek to 
remodel circumstances into a form admitting of a better 
right for themselves and those to come ; why the taste 
becomes the accomplice of the will, and the edifice of 
obligation is voluntarily extended beyond its necessary 
foundations. But religion, as we understand it, is a matter 
of natural feeling ; natural feeling is the product of con- 
stant natural or necessary sequences, and to feel on all 
points with the best and strongest tendencies of the Not- 
self is to feel the sufficiency, as motive, of those natural 
facts which are the efficient cause or sine qua non of that 
which is about to happen with the co-operation of the will. 
In other words, a man who is at once moral and religious 
does not ask what is the good of morality, or demand a 
god to praise and recompense him; he acts virtuously 
under a natural sense of obligation, and his habitual state 
of feeling is favourable, not adverse, to the existence of 
such obligations as he owns : he does not wish for a 
different kind of liberty from that which he possesses by 
natural grace, the liberty to will nobly and well. 

But, it will perhaps be said, this religion of ours is a 
fair-weather creed : that nature, in the form of the world, 
the flesh, and the devil, is by no means always on the side 
of man in his struggles after what is Best. To many it 
seems hard to believe in a truth which calls no Deios ex 
machina to the rescue of human souls in trouble or 
temptation. The powers of darkness are as real, albeit as 
impersonal, as the divine principles of truth, purity, and 
loving-kindness, and man seems in evil case alone between 
the conflict of superhuman tendencies, his deliverance hard 



RELIGION. 



203 



to believe in. But no Gospel has ever yet been preached 
according to which, it was easy to have a saving faith; 
and our faith has as much power as another to save 
human souls in trouble and temptation; the difficulty 
lies only in attaining to the faith — that man alone, for his 
own sake and the sake of his fellows, freely desires and 
necessarily labours to attain the measure of human ex- 
cellence which has been granted him implicitly by his 
antecedents. And by his own efforts, and by the help of 
his fellows, this measure he may and does attain. 

This is the simple history of the matter, and it is found 
increasingly hard to make room for gods or devils at any 
stage of the whole process. 1 But it is also true that in 
the recurring times of trouble and temptation which fall 
to the lot of mortals without distinction of creed, mortal 
weakness will send out sighs, not unlike a prayer, for the 
help that will never come for wishing. The mind looks 
round for succour because it is wanted, not because it is 
to be had. So in bodily pain, if the will suppresses 
every sound of complaint and controls every muscular 
contraction, the eyes still wander restlessly as if to seek 
some way of escape, though the reason has submitted to 
the knowledge that there is none. So it has been, and so 
it will be : there is nothing harder on earth than the agony 
of a solitary soul in pain or temptation. And there is 
no God to make the rough ways smooth. But, though the 
struggle is hard, victory is always possible to the single- 
minded lover of truth and rectitude; and what more is 
needed, in the hour of trial, than faith in the possibility of 
victory ? alone or helped by gods or men the struggle is 
hard, or why this craving for some help ? But though it 
is hard, it is none the more hopeless, although there are no 
gods to help. A man has but to will, to resolve with an 
undivided mind, and the past, from a master, becomes a 
slave ; all that has been done or suffered before him, served 
to enable him to will thus, served to prevent his willing 
otherwise than as he has chosen. We say the past is our 

1 See Addenda G., page 370. 



204 



NATURAL LAW. 



servant when we have done what we thought well to do ; it 
is our tyrant when we have done ill, and life is on the one 
side a struggle to escape from the tyranny of natural evil 
which we hate, on the other an aspiration after the posses- 
sion of natural good, which we love and delight in the 
more, the more we know and possess of it in ourselves. 

To conclude briefly : the sum of objective influences go 
to make men wish to do and be the best they can. The 
a Not-ourselves makes for righteousness," not by holding 
out rewards for good works, but by material incentives to 
their performance, which in the long run, and as a rule, 
prevail over carnal wilfulness or seductions. The virtue 
of men is conditioned by motive forces behind them, not 
by inducements before; but the strongest passions and 
desires of men are either an echo or a prophecy of their 
strongest tendencies, and nothing is more certain, taking 
the experience of the race or of the individual as a whole 3 
than that the affections will become engaged on the side 
of whatever conduct is habitual. Faithful, unswerving 
performance will turn every duty into a labour of love. 

And yet it is a common charge against atheistical 
moralists that their doctrine is sad and comfortless ; they 
show the life that now is with ruthless candour, and they 
hold out no hope of compensation in a different future. 
They are dreaded and distrusted as false prophets of evil, 
because they avow that evil exists, and have no arts of 
logical legerdemain to prove that its existence is a good 
in disguise. Perhaps it is true that we have fallen upon 
evil days, when the sympathy between man and the course 
of things is exceptionally intermittent and incomplete, but 
certainly not less sad than ours is the creed of those who 
believe in a heaven to come for the few, but think and 
preach that our generation is rushing steadily towards the 
opposite goal of perdition. What can be more intensely 
miserable and depressing a creed than to believe that there 
is a right, that there is blessedness to come, and that our 
fellows are wantonly and wilfully turning their backs upon 



RELIGION. 



205 



it ? Perhaps we ourselves have fallen upon evil days : it 
is long since men have felt so severely critical as they do 
now, not of each other, but of themselves ; for ages past 
there has not been among us so much of that "divine 
discontent " which lashes the strong to mastery, the weak 
to despair. We crave after supreme good, we imagine that 
if we could only see and know what was absolutely best 
for us to-day, no sacrifice would be too great to buy the 
salvation of its possession. But, alas ! we do not know, at 
most we guess doubtfully, or if we know, the best for us 
to-day may be an unlovely compromise, a sacrifice which 
leaves us ashamed and angry with the order that has 
no nobler, more fruitful duties to impose on us to-day. 
But, granted all this, is the best that we can do to curse 
our day and despair of the morrows of our race ? Is this 
the duty to which we are most strongly impelled by our 
natural, inborn appetite for the very Good ? Is the fact 
that we find it hard to meet with duties to our mind a 
proof that the Eight is not adorable ? hard or easy, it is our 
doom to love the best, and seek it where it may be found ; 
and if the search is harder than usual, now or at any 
other time, in proportion to the difficulty of the quest 
will be the delight and triumph of success for those who 
live to reach it. 

And we have nothing in common with those prophets 
of evil who say there can be no success, or that all the 
roads by which men are seeking now are roads to no 
result but ruin. In the words of an ancient : " Deus est 
mortali juvare mortalem et hsec ad seternam gloriam 
via;" the way is open, and the combined, concerted 
efforts of mankind may yet make it the thoroughfare of 
nations. We are not so much in love with the past as to 
think the victory is won if we live our life no worse, after 
its kind, than the ancestors gone before us into everlast- 
ing peace, lived theirs. But there is a victory to win ; it 
is the great mystery which no prophet has power to 
reveal, the open impenetrable secret of the future whether, 



206 



NATURAL LAW. 



man pitted against the powers of darkness, man will 
triumph, or at last succumb, or must for ever linger on as 
now, struggling, compromising, bartering old loss for new 
gain, journeying leagues upon a treadmill that would 
crush him in its cranks if he ceased to keep up the form 
of progress which holds him rooted to the spot. Men 
cry out after an Unknown God, and reverence an unnamed 
Unknowable, and thus much of piety we profess towards 
the unsounded infinites of real Being ; we do not believe, 
feel, or see them to contain the materials for a law of 
stable imperfection. Evil there is, change there is, but 
we see no inherent vitality in the mal-adjustment of 
things dooming the real changes which shall take place 
to preserve unbroken just this measure of mal-adjust- 
ment which makes life to many of us an evil lot. The 
success that we should praise, that we desire and some- 
times almost believe in, is growth towards a more and 
more harmonious social life, such an organisation of mate- 
rial interests that it shall not seem to any one as if the 
imperfection of a fellow could minister to his good, or the 
suffering of a fellow to Ms happiness : it is such a general 
development of scrupulous intelligence that men shall live 
in religious awe of consequences, and act as those who 
must give account for their doings, even to the third 
generation of effects : it is a life so lawful and orderly for 
the masses that the leaders of thought need not despair of 
finding a fulcrum in their hearers' feeling when they point 
to a better that might be done if we willed : it is agree- 
ment, outspoken agreement, a friendship as brotherly as 
in primitive religions, between all those who have one 
faith, in human nature ; one hope, in human effort ; one 
God, in the soul's vision of a perfect right ; and alas ! one 
baptism of sin, sorrow, and privation, from which few of 
us emerge without wounds, stain, or discouragement. 

We cannot tell, for the experiment has never yet been 
tried, what human life might be if all the faculties of 
living men and women were spent in making it easy to 



RELIGION. 



207 



each other to live as human beings should. At present it 
is difficult, and the few who are born with the power of 
doing much to make the existence of the many less diffi- 
cult are hampered in the exercise of their function by our 
stupidity, and wait with patient compassion, scarcely 
touched with scorn, for the time when great deeds may be 
again possible to those who may again have a united mul- 
titude to lead on what it shall have learned to be its own 
way, and who, seeing the natural order ere it yet exists, 
will once more dare to believe that the record of their 
vision is prophetical. But if the heroes delay too long, 
we need not wait their help to build up 

" The Being that we are ; 
Thus deeply drinking in the soul of things, 
We shall be wise perforce, and while inspired 
By choice, and conscious that the Will is free, 
Shall move unswerving, even as if impelled 
By strict necessity, along the path 
Of order and of good. Whate'er we see, 
Or feel, shall tend to quicken and refine ; 
Shall fix, in calmer seats of moral strength, 
Earthly desires, and raise to loftier heights 
Of divine love our intellectual soul." 



I 



V. 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 
ALTRUISM. 



" Whoever was to be born at all, was to be born a child, and to do before 
he could understand, and be bred under laws to which he was always bound, 
but which could not always be exacted ; and he was to choose when he could 
not reason, and had passions most strong when he had his understanding 
most weak, and was to ride a wild horse without a bridle, and the more need 
he had of a curb, the less strength he had to use it; and this being the case 
of all the world, what was every man's evil became all men's greater evil ; 
and though alone it was very bad, yet when they came together it was made 
much worse; like ships in a storm, every one alone hath enough to do to 
outride it ; but when they meet, besides the evils of the storm, they find the 
intolerable calamity of their mutual concussion, and every ship that is ready 
to be oppressed with the tempest is a worse tempest to every vessel against 
which it is violently dashed. So it is in mankind ; every man hath evil 
enough of his own, and it is hard for a man to live soberly, temperately, and 
religiously ; but when he hath parents and children, brothers and sisters, 
friends and enemies, buyers and sellers, lawyers and physicians, a family 
and a neighbourhood, a king over him or tenants under him, a bishop to rule 
in matters of government spiritual, and a people to be ruled by him in the 
affairs of their souls, then it is that every man dashes against another, and one 
relation requires what another denies ; and when one speaks, another will 
contradict him ; and that which is well spoken is sometimes innocently mis- 
taken, and that upon a good cause produces an evil effect. And by these, 
and ten thousand other concurrent causes, man is made more than most 
miserable."— Jekemt Taylor. 

" That which hitherto hath been spoken concerneth natural agents con- 
sidered in themselves. But we must further remember also (which thing to 
touch in a word shall suffice), that as in this respect they have their law, 
which law directeth them in the means whereby they tend to their own per- 
fection, so likewise another law there is, which toucheth them as they are 
sociable parts united into one body ; a law which bindeth them each to serve 
unto other's good, and all to prefer the good of the whole to whatsoever 
their own particular ; as we plainly see they do, when things natural in that 
regard forget their ordinary natural wont, that which is heavy mounting 
sometime upwards of its own accord, and forsaking the centre of the earth, 
which to itself is most natural, even as if it did hear itself commanded to let 
go the good it privately wisheth, and to relieve the present distress of nature 
in common."— Hookee. 



0 



.Retrospect — The " sufficient reason " for moral conduct naturally identified 
with the standard of morality : Conscience, Utility, or Perfection — 
Action instinctive or rational; instinctive action disinterested — Power 
of acting (which generates wish to act) increases more rapidly than 
power of enjoying — Power of acting with or upon other men craves 
exercise as it develops— When sensible pleasures are too few to supply 
ends for all the active energies, men borrow enough of their neighbours' 
consciousness to furnish new ends for rational pursuit— The natural 
history of altruism— Social discords accidental— Social wisdom and virtue 
consist mainly in harmonising the tendencies that exist, not in bringing 
them all into conformity with some outer standard — The general law 
of social duty enforced by penal sanctions, the force of which upon the 
human will is due to those same natural tendencies which caused the 
law to be proclaimed. 



V. 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF ALTRUISM. 

In the foregoing argument, the critical reader will perhaps 
be inclined to object, that we have travelled a long way in 
search of a starting-point that we might as well have taken 
for granted at once. We have thrown no new light on the 
philosophy of legislation, or the nature of human duties, 
or the propriety of religious observances. We have only 
vindicated, by somewhat far-fetched processes, our right 
to speak of law, morality, and religion in the tone of good, 
common-sensible people, who do take for granted that the 
law of the land and of conscience are to be obeyed and 
reverenced, and the Best they know reverenced and loved. 

Such a task may well seem unproductive. We have 
added no stone to the sacred building of human duty and 
aspiration; our part has been rather that of the idle spec- 
tator, who assures a frightened child that the building 
will not tumble down, though the workmen are busy 
knocking away the scaffolding that seemed to hold it up, 
and really did support the builders — whose work is over for 
a season. When the last defacing plank is carried away, 
we see the edifice erect, and ask what stone of it is want- 
ing ? but we have not yet described the fabric. We have 
tried to show that moral obligation may be recognised 
without unreason, and that the natural feeling of man is 
not hostile to the supreme forces which rule his will, but 
we have avoided entering in any detail upon the substance 
of the moral law till we could speak of its precepts as at 
once supremely authoritative and yet enforced by purely 
natural sanctions. 



212 



NA TURAL LA W. 



If our reasoning lias been correct, the dictates of nature, 
law, morality, and religion substantially coincide; they 
are different phases of the same general tendency, varying 
only in the intensity of their self- consciousness and in the 
number of phenomena presented by each one in orderly 
relations. The existence of the universe is a physical, to 
our apprehension, an ultimate fact : but as soon as this fact 
has been perceived or postulated, everything within the 
universe is, at least in theory, equally explicable ; that is to 
say, every real process may be observed if the human senses 
are acute enough, or aided by sufficiently delicate instru- 
ments, to record the phenomena as they occur ; and every 
real relation amongst the different series of observed facts 
may be known and classed with other real relations, if the 
human intellect is comprehensive enough to take in and 
co-ordinate ail the material furnished to it by perception. 
The simplest phenomena of life are to us as mysterious as 
the refinements of the intellect and conscience, and the 
result which we call " understanding " in the one case is, 
humanly speaking, equally attainable in all. 

To make the existence of law, morality, and religion 
appear reasonable, we must take account that it is also 
natural and real. We do not suppose any transcendental 
or metaphysical necessity at work to make men peaceable, 
moral, or affectionate : and if habits of order and virtue 
could be proved to be unreasonable, that is to say, con- 
ducive to ends not deliberately desired by sane men, we 
do not doubt that the human race would very reasonably 
put an end to its own existence by their disuse. But 
reason does not operate in vacuo ; it presupposes some 
data in nature and fact ; and if it is on the whole natural 
to man to act generally in accordance with the rules of 
law and justice, this fact gives an element of reasonable- 
ness to the sentiment which survives the most rationalistic 
criticism of moral obligation — the sentiment of acquies- 
cence in the force of those rules. 

The difficulty experienced by a candid theist in con- 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF ALTRUISM. 213 



ceiving how disinterested virtue can survive if religious faith 
is lost, arises from the fact that all his own disinterested 
feeling towards the Not-self is associated with his own parti- 
cular beliefs about the Not-self and its nature. But where 
those beliefs are entirely wanting, their juace is taken, not 
by the comparatively few natural impulses that, if uncon- 
trolled, might lead to impiety or lawlessness, but by a still 
disinterested apprehension of the real relations of the self 
to the Not- self, which could scarcely be expected to contain 
within it a motive for the — impossible — subversion of that 
relation. The explanation of such harmony as there is 
between the will of man and the laws of the world in 
which he lives is that the evolution of human conscious- 
ness took place, historically, under conditions of which 
those laws are the record. Individual men are numbered 
amongst the elements of which the whole, the universe, is 
composed, and their life as parts includes cohesion to the 
other parts with which their existence is bound up ; and 
since the cohesion is real, the after-reflection which acqui- 
esces in its reality cannot be called unreasonable. 

It would be vain indeed to hope to persuade the mass 
of men to co-operate disinterestedly with the universe in 
perfecting the human species up to the highest point which 
the constitution of the universe will allow — if they would 
really rather not. We only suggest that most of them 
have a slight natural tendency or inclination to do so 
already, that is likely to grow stronger rather than weaker 
by becoming increasingly self-conscious. We have no 
standard of human perfection outside the suggestions of 
human attainment, and there is no apparent source, ex- 
cept the practice or aspirations of men, from whence the 
moral ideal to which they themselves think they " ought " 
to approximate can have been derived ; but science can- 
not ignore the fact that they have an ideal, and, fortu- 
nately for our peace of mind, science does nothing to 
destroy or lower whatever ideal they have. Naturalists 
at least escape the mental trouble of religious doubts and 



214 



NATURAL LAW. 



difficulties, which are so familiar a trial to those who, 
consciously or otherwise, try to serve two masters, and 
own two laws, of nature and super-nature. 

The subjective aspect of morality, or the feeling of 
obligation in general, is the product of a certain minimum 
stability of type in the human species, conjoined with the 
highly evolved consciousness peculiar to man, which adds 
a peculiar sense of subjective necessity to the persistence 
in certain classes of natural actions when they are in 
any way impeded ; this is the physical or natural explana- 
tion of conscience, and if correct in fact, would be per- 
fectly satisfactory to reason. The matter of morality, or 
the nature of the moral ideal which their common human- 
ity, so to speak, sets before the mind and will of indi- 
vidual men, has not the same appearance of a logical or 
natural necessity as that which ensures and demonstrates 
the existence of a moral law of some sort. If men had 
been, by nature or kind, something quite different from 
what they are, they might still have had a morality, if 
their consciousness and their relation to the medium of 
their activity had been of the same order as at present, 
but its substance or precepts might have been altogether 
out of relation to the life with which we are familiar. 
Yet morality, to us, is so essentially a practical matter, 
that our feeling does not recognise, as a motive for doing 
what — to us — is right, this general fact of conditionedness, 
which might conceivably have allowed us to become sub- 
ject to a different moral law from the one we actually own. 
We do not say that the right is right because we have come 
to feel it so ; what we do feel to be so is right for us, 
though we acknowledge, as an intellectual possibility, that 
a different species in a different medium might be bound 
by quite different rules of feeling as well as of fact. 

The existing difference of opinion as to the sufficient 
reason for doing right is really a form of the existing un- 
certainty as to what constitutes the " rightness " of an 
action. It is agreed that some things are right, and that 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF ALTRUISM. 21s 



what is right ought to be done ; but we want a satisfac- 
tory test, which shall at once guide and verify our judg- 
ment and impulses, and itself receive verification from our 
intuition that in every case the conduct which satisfies the 
test is really and truly the very right. Moral science can 
have no existence unless such a test is to be found, for we 
own no duties except such as are knowable and feasible, 
we feel no obligation to stumble by guess work in the 
dark, and the moral antinomies with which some writers 
are pleased to darken the counsels of perfection are as re- 
pugnant to sane feeling as to clear and adequate thought. 

This demand for a test or standard of moral right sug- 
gested itself at the beginning of the discussion, but in 
repeating it here, we do not reopen the whole question ; 
we have still, it is true, to choose between the lists of 
obligations made out in conformity with rival tests, but 
we are free to accept, without metaphysical scruples, the 
force of whichever code our choice virtually accepts in its 
entirety, by its acceptance of the appropriate standard. 
Our will is — reasonably and necessarily — bound by some 
moral law ; we have only to agree upon its substance and 
proclaim its sanctions. 

If we leave out of account theories which include an 
appeal to divine revelation, the competing standards may, 
for practical purposes, be reduced to four : the test of con- 
science, or conformity to the moral feeling of the indi- 
vidual; the test of Hedonism, or selfish Utilitarianism, 
namely, conduciveness to the greatest happiness of the 
agent ; that of Social Utilitarianism, i.e., conduciveness to 
the greatest happiness of the greatest number ; and lastly, 
the test of moral and religious idealism, conduciveness to 
the greatest general perfection. Of course we cannot 
attempt to decide a priori which of these classes of con- 
siderations " ought " to be preferred, or assume that one 
standard is intrinsically more beautiful and exalted than 
another ; our business is only to ascertain, by analysis, 
comparison, and inference, which class of considerations 



2l6 



NATURAL LAW. 



most men are, or habitually wish to be, guided by, because 
natural wish is incipient tendency ; and though the order 
of nature is not so adjusted as to provide for the indul- 
gence of every individual human wish, general tendencies, 
or wishes common to a whole species, cannot, we suppose, 
have arisen, and become even to some extent hereditary, 
under conditions habitually adverse to their growth and 
exercise. Even when the nature of the moral ideal gene- 
rally accepted had been determined, we should not there- 
fore be entitled to say that each individual " ought " to 
feel the pursuit of the same ideal binding on his con- 
science. My belief or conviction that you ought to do 
your duty (especially to me) is too much reinforced by 
my obvious interest to be allowed any serious scientific 
weight, and not the least among the practical advantages 
of our theory is that it promises to relieve us from the 
burdensome and unremunerative task of keeping our 
neighbours' consciences ; for since consciences can honestly 
disagree, while the moral beliefs of the individuals are an 
essential condition of the obligations he feels, the subjec- 
tive rule of right may differ for you and me, even though 
we both believe that there is only one true objective rule. 

In order, then, to find the test of right in conscience, we 
should either have to assume that most consciences agree, 
and that the majority are right, which would leave the 
decision of conscience in each particular case open to de- 
bate, or we should have to take conscientiousness, a word 
with a perfectly exact and intelligible meaning, as itself 
the standard ; assuming not only that most consciences 
are right, but also that most decisions of the same con- 
science are right too, so that the most conscientious persons, 
i.e., those who most uniformly act in accordance with their 
own belief as to what is right, are also the best or most 
virtuous. The association of merit with the word " con- 
scientious " proves sufficiently that this is the general con- 
clusion, but the double character of the process of infer- 
ence makes the standard more than usually uncertain as a 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF ALTRUISM. 217 



practical guide. If, as previously maintained, what people 
honestly believe to be right is the nearest approach pos- 
sible (to them) to their own natural good or perfection, 
conscientiousness must be called a good ; it is the quality 
most essential to the individual that aims at being good of 
its kind. But the species man, we must remember, is 
divided into many sub-classes, and the same, or nearly 
the same, degree of conscientiousness may be accompanied 
by great inequality and divergence of tastes and faculties ; 
to a certain extent even, in matters of morality, each 
individual may be said to constitute a class apart, for the 
natural aspiration of the individual is to attain its own 
good, not a good as like as possible to that which its 
neighbour thinks good; and if the attempt is successful, 
since nature is her own standard of perfection, it is not 
easy to see how we can rationally give the preference over 
one well-developed nature to another nature, no better 
developed, of a different kind, unless by reference to some 
naturally existing objective standard. The naturally con- 
ditioned aspirations of different individuals fix the out- 
line of what is good for each of them ; but the mere exist- 
ence of a strong inward bias in favour of one class or 
another of actions or abstentions gives little presumption 
in favour of the wisdom or goodness of the acts deter- 
mined by the bias. The bias of the majority is right in 
the majority of cases, but such an empirical generalisation 
as this gives us no help in the only cases where help is 
needed, i.e., when the doubt arises whether we have to do 
with an example of the general rule or an exception to it. 

The standard of Utilitarianism is open to precisely the 
same objection as the standard of conscience ; in the one 
case moral, in the other, physical inclination supplies the 
rule, and the ruling of inclination is not invariable. Con- 
stancy in the subjective element is secured by taking spon- 
taneity, in the first or the second degree, as the essential 
part of lawfulness ; but the impulses of conscience and desire 
do not always and necessarily lead to an objective good, 



218 



NATURAL LAW. 



and we are loth to abandon the faith that evil results 
must spring from some other root than good. We want 
a rule that can never falter or mislead. The external 
motives to the pressure of which men are exposed, and the 
internal susceptibilities which determine the effect of the 
motives, are in general innocent as well as natural in their 
tendency, and in general men act as comes natural to 
them without scrupulous self-questioning. Sometimes the 
inner rule of conscience narrows the area of natural 
choice, and forbids the will to choose a demoralising 
pleasure or to follow a maleficent impulse. But there is 
a still higher tribunal before which the conscience itself 
may be arraigned, and found guilty of narrowness, preju- 
dice, and short or oblique vision. Sensible good and moral 
good are excellent things in their way, but they are each only 
parts of the supreme natural good of Natural Perfection ; 
and it is to this ultimate standard of natural good that we 
must appeal before we can find a rule at once recognisable 
and acceptable to the will, feeling, and intelligence of each 
man as supreme for other men as well as for himself, and 
for himself as well as for others. That which is praised 
as good, semper, uhiqice, ab omnibus, is not man's changing 
sense of pleasure, not his changing sense of duty, it is the 
perfect hfe,made up of pleasure, duty, and energetic impulse, 
with their unexplained substratum of natural force. 

We have before this met the anticipated objection that 
the standard of natural perfection itself must vary, if 
growth and evolution are among the facts of nature. 
Moral obligation is always the same, as regards man, the 
moral agent, however much the range of dutiful action 
may be extended; and the perfection of the moment is 
always the same, as regards the sum of things and persons 
then naturally existing, though each succeeding age may 
witness the development of fuller and more varied being 
than its predecessors. The standard of natural good 
varies with the multiplication or differentiation of natural 
existence, but the standards are always alike in the form 



THE NATURAL HISTORY~OF ALTRUISM. 219 



of their exactingness, and there is only one standard at a 
time to which conformity is right, while the relation in 
which the men of each generation stand to their own 
proper standard is unchanging. 

Of course it is an effort to the mind, and still more, 
perhaps, to the feelings, to recognise the permanence of 
relations amid the flux of things, and the permanent 
qualities of things amid their varying relations ; but 
we have no right to expect either the theory or the 
application of ethical science to be easy, seeing that it 
deals with the most complex relations of the most com- 
plex of natural beings — the relations of men amongst 
themselves. But it is at all events needless to afflict our- 
selves with difficulties that neutralise each other, and 
combine speculative despair over the unintelligible pre- 
judice men feel in favour of right conduct with querulous 
complaints over the absence of a sufficient reason for prac- 
tical rectitude. It is impossible to find broad general 
arguments to support the paradox that it would be better 
for every one, everywhere and always, to have preferred 
natural evil or imperfection to good. It may be said with 
truth that many persons would get more sensible, personal 
pleasure out of their lives by well-chosen lapses from vir- 
tue than by conduct uniformly in accordance with the 
counsels of perfection ; and any one who has the courage 
of the opinion may add that the reasons available in such 
cases are not sufficient to make self-sacrifice rational. 
And we know in practice that they are not, unfortunately, 
found sufficient — by many persons of dull moral sensi- 
bility. But this does not make it any more possible to 
maintain, on abstract grounds, the paradox that dull moral 
sensibility is a natural good or condition of good. A law, 
to revert to our first definition, is a statement of con- 
stant relations posited by the nature of things, and no 
constant relations follow from the nature of things in so 
far as they are abnormal, i.e., of irregular or imperfect de- 
velopment after their kind. 



220 



NATURAL LAW. 



Moral good lias no existence apart from human feelings 
of obligation, but the law accepted and proclaimed by 
conscience is not one of its own invention ; it formulates 
necessities which owe at least half their being to external 
influences, and these outward conditions of all the true 
provisions of natural law subsist independently of the 
human sensibilities which they help to keep alive. It is 
because the broad conditions of life and association are the 
same for every one, everywhere and always, that we count 
every one as subject to the same moral law, and blame 
imperfect sensibility to moral considerations as a flaw in 
the human character, and it is not a valid objection to the 
natural generality of the law that it is sometimes broken 
and sometimes obeyed with difficulty. 

The history of morality, for any one capable of dealing 
with so wide a subject, would consist mainly in an account 
of the successive development of impulses, feelings, and 
desires which resulted, under historical conditions, in 
forming the human character into those habits and capa- 
bilities of feeling and action which give then actual force 
to natural and moral motives ; and at each stage we 
should find, as now, the rival standards of utility, con- 
science, and idealism (more or less obscurely expressed) 
used to measure the distance between what was, and what, 
it was supposed, " ought " to be. The only part of this pro- 
cess that immediately concerns us is the relative share of 
moral and utilitarian considerations in determining con- 
duct to tend towards the objective best, and the several 
contributions of disinterested and self-regarding motives 
to the composite system of needs and wishes out of which 
a supreme ideal of good is to be selected as the aim of 
aspiration rather than desire. 

Grote, in his criticism of the Utilitarian philosophy, has 
noticed the fallacy of neglecting the energetic principles of 
human nature, and treating all action as if it were motived 
by some form or other of sensibility. In point of fact, 
the division of human motives into selfish and other- 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF ALTRUISM. 221 



selfish 1 ones, needs to be supplemented by a distinction 
between moral unselfishness, or disinterested action con- 
ducive to the general good, and the objective material 
altruism of acting for or upon other things, for the sake of 
acting, not for the sake of any personal end involved in 
the action ; between the moral unselfishness of feeling for 
and with the pleasures of others and the constitutional 
expansiveness which makes the individual depend even 
for selfish pleasures on the acts and feelings of other 
people. And in examining the normal motives for action, 
we must not be misled by the double- entendre of Utilitari- 
anism, which argues that in all cases alike we do as we 
please, because if we didn't please, we might do something 
else, and that therefore our pleasure is the ultimate 
motive of all our acts. In all cases, no doubt, we do as we 
choose, or will, but the preference is of a different kind, 
and has different causes, and it is arbitrary to assume that 
because the result is the same, i.e., some kind of act or 
abstention, the motive must be the same, either physically 
or to consciousness. The assumption begs the very 
question at issue, whether all human motives can be 
brought under the same head, or have any one common 
quality besides efficiency. 

To ascertain the kind of inducements that determine the 
will to one action rather than another, we need to know 
the kind of ends which the mind is naturally qualified, 
which is nearly the same thing as predisposed, to follow. 
The sensible good or evil of the organism, that is, pleasure 
or pain, are motives to action or forbearance when circum- 
stances bring them, directly or indirectly, before the mind, 
but they are by no means coextensive with the possible 
field of human action. Pleasure and pain are forms of 
consciousness, but there are states of consciousness 
that are indifferent without therefore being incapable of 

1 Some purists object to " altruist " as barbarous, but we have no con- 
venient English synonym, 



222 



NATURAL LAW. 



determination to action. 1 Except so far as conscious- 
ness is Ding an sich, our own existence is phenomenal, 
a series of phenomenal states of consciousness; if other 
phenomena than those of our own natural life can find a 
place in consciousness, it is obvious that such conscious- 
ness may suggest fresh ends of action, and if such ends 
come again to be adopted by the will, they may even take 
the form of personal sensibility and compete with the 
primary impulses and desires of sense. The only abso- 
lutely undecomposable pleasures the enjoyment of which 
can be proposed as an end are those connected with the 
bodily senses, for the satisfaction arising from the con- 
sciousness of faculty, the exercise of the power to do what 
belongs to a man, as well as merely to enjoy, is scarcely 
separated in consciousness from the rational motive or 
instinctive impulse that has led to the exercise of the 
faculty. 

We are not in a position to explain why the pleasure of 
different passive states of consciousness is much differen- 
tiated (e.g., the enjoyment of the gourmand and of the 
musical amateur), while the pleasurableness of all activity 
is generically alike, though the localisation of perception 
in special organs has probably something to do with the 
fact. The identity of an action that we think and speak 
of as one is built up of many elements, the connection 
between which may be entirely ideal, and as conscious- 
ness is certainly localised, there can be no bodily sense of 
a complicated performance capable of developing into a 
special pleasurable perception or state of consciousness. 
All human action that is not determined to the gratifica- 
tion of simple appetites is compounded of the blind dis- 
interested impulse to act as we can, accompanied by a 

1 " If action were strictly dependent on sensation and emotion, it would 
be found to be always proportionate to those stimuli, but such propor- 
tion palpably and notoriously fails to hold good. . . . Without this spon- 
taneity of our actions the growth of volition or of activity guided to ends, 
is all but inexplicable."— Bain : Senses and Intellect, p. 84. 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF ALTRUISM. 223 



faint general sense of pleasure in the consciousness of 
action, which becomes stronger as the ideal integration 
of the action proceeds; to which is added an imaginary 
foretaste of the pleasure or other good that is to be the 
final effect of the action considered as a whole. 

Passive states of consciousness, if they were equally 
and indifferently pleasurable, would not furnish motives to 
one variety of action rather than another, and as all action 
is in itself indifferent, the coincidence of the inducements 
of sense with the incitements of instinct appears to have 
been the original condition of the varied life, which is 
itself the condition of what we call rational action. In- 
creasingly various action among different sections of the 
community results in the formation of new relations, which 
suggest new interests, social as well as self-regarding, and 
the pursuit of every fresh interest under conditions of grow- 
ing complexity is pregnant with new possibilities of insti- 
gation. But the pleasure found in the fulfilment of simple 
tendencies becomes less clearly marked in actions which, 
though still normal, are of so composite a character that 
the intellectual element in the satisfaction accompanying 
it swamps the sensible delight. In the contrast between 
the incessant restless activity of the civilised man and the 
dolce far niente existence of the savage in a favourable 
climate, nothing is more remarkable than the disproportion 
between the increase of the power to will and that of the 
power to enjoy. The senses have not grown more numer- 
ous or acute, and though susceptibility to their influences 
may have been in some cases refined and heightened, their 
solicitations probably suggest, absolutely as well as com- 
paratively, fewer actions to the Western European than to 
the South Sea islander. It would be paradoxical to say 
that as life becomes more complicated and intellectual, it 
becomes less rational, that is to say, made up of actions 
where impulse counted proportionately for more and in- 
ducements for less than with the savage ; but when we 
find an increase in the number and difficulty of the 



224 



NATURAL LAW. 



actions habitually performed, without any corresponding 
increase in the number or strength of the sensible induce- 
ments for their performance, we are led to conclude, not 
that the action is irrational, but that it is still deliberately 
directed towards the attainment of an end, only to some 
other end than sensible enjoyment. We conclude that, 
consciously or not, the sufficient reason which in practice 
moves the mass of men to their habitual modicum of 
innocent and meritorious activity is the force of their 
own native tendency towards the chief natural good of 
full specific life, not a narrower preference for the limited 
number of ends accidentally made desirable for them- 
selves. 

We do not have to choose between Nature, Pleasure, and 
Morality, as three rival masters with incompatible claims ; 
life, joy, and virtue are all equally natural, but every 
natural good is followed by the shadow of a corresponding 
evil — natural privation or strife — and hence we come to 
distinguish as good of a special kind the rarer, hardly- won 
goal of pleasant or perfect life ; we distinguish between 
natural good and evil; between natural perfection and 
the want of force or want of harmony which makes life 
painful or abnormal; between the measure of natural 
imperfection which ends in sensible pain — the injury of 
one sufferer, and that which results in vital evil — in the 
self-perpetuating wrongness of action antagonistic to the 
common natural good. And after contemplating the phe- 
nomena of life from every side, we come to the result that 
man is more essentially a moral agent than a self-pleasing 
one ; that is to say, the largest part of his existence is 
actually and potentially determined by the tendencies ot 
healthy life within and around him, and consists in more 
or less conscious service of and co-operation with those 
tendencies ; while only the lesser part is determined by a 
craving for the personal sense of healthy life which con- 
stitutes the good fortune of the happy. The more con- 
scious and complete this service of nature at her best, the 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF ALTRUISM. 225 



more morally excellent the agent; the more objectively 
efficient the service, and the more easily and gaily it is 
rendered, the greater his natural perfection. But if 
objective hindrances quite beyond the agent's control 
make the service of nature's best from first to last a painful 
toil, man is left with no natural good but the moral good 
of self-devotion, and we are not justified in imposing 
the human standard on nature, and praising the virtue 
of an order which teaches some few of us to attain what, 
in a world where it is needed, we think the chief good, the 
power of self-devotion to the common Best. We are only 
tempted to exalt morality above nature — as we unhesitat- 
ingly exalt it above pleasure — when we find human virtue 
waging unequal war against natural evil, and more natur- 
ally admirable in defeat than the most omnipotent of fiends 
throned in a subject universe. We are the children of 
nature, and self-respect, if not filial piety, should warn us 
not to disparage our descent ; but our parent, with rever- 
ence be it said, is of hybrid birth, and true piety should 
make us faithful to the finest strain in our ancestry, and it 
is on this ground that we venture to claim as truly natural 
in ourselves all that is most in harmony with what we 
call best in the works of the great genetrix. 

The manifestations of innocent natural force in the 
ordinary activities of life must be called disinterested ; but 
with the development of intelligence, of which the chief 
feature is the passing into consciousness of an increasing 
number of natural tendencies, those forms of natural action 
which have most nearly established themselves as habits 
are acquiesced in by the will, and the ends which their 
exercise tends to effect are proposed by reason as the goal 
towards which other stray faculties and unoccupied im- 
pulses are to be directed. In other words, will is sub- 
stituted for desire as a motive, and the will is so nearly 
arbitrary that it may almost be called free as well as dis- 
interested; and it is only by tracing something like an 
orderly sequence in its resolves that we can prove dis- 

P 



226 



NATURAL LAW. 



interested volitions to be not necessarily unreasonable, or 
abnormally arbitrary. Granting that there is something 
peculiarly rational in action which promises to procure the 
enjoyment of some sensible good, which, under favourable 
circumstances, is also the natural good of the active or- 
ganism, some action must also be taken to employ the 
faculties which are either unfitted for the quest of sensible 
pleasure, or for any reason temporarily released from its 
pursuit. When ideal ends of conduct are substituted for 
material ones, since the substitution is entirely disin- 
terested, the ends that will be proposed will be — not such 
as are useful or agreeable, but such as are possible, such 
as the individual is naturally able to propose, and it does 
not follow that his ability in this respect will be great, for 
we do not allow that the imagination can do more than 
rearrange the data of former experiences. 

Experience seems to show that when men are ripe for 
action, but have no motive of their own to act upon, they 
borrow enough of their neighbour's consciousness to sug- 
gest one ; or rather, perhaps, when the habit of acting or 
feeling in certain ways has become deeply rooted in our 
nature, sympathetic motives or the mere representation of 
the circumstances are enough to rouse it into exercise. It 
would be impossible to form, much less to indulge, the 
complicated artificial desires of civilised life in a total soli- 
tude. The actions in which we learn to take pleasure are 
actions performed with, by, or upon our fellow-men, and 
as the purpose which makes the action rational is some 
ideal end — not the material mechanical steps in its per- 
formance, with which alone sensible pleasure could be 
associated — the elements of which the pleasure is made up 
will be ideal also. The simplest form in which we see the 
action of borrowed motives is in the observance of custom, 
which is always a shade more constant than a mere natural 
agreement of inclination and circumstances would make it, 
to which fact, indeed, its incipient legality is owing. But 
the first new faculty, of a distinctly human kind, which we 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF ALTRUISM. 227 

must suppose to have been developed by the practice of 
social life, is that of influencing and being influenced by 
the thoughts and conduct of other individuals of the same 
species. Besides the faint natural pleasure attendant on 
the exercise of this, as of any other normal faculty (which 
favours its development, as children learn to talk by chatter- 
ing for the pleasure of making themselves heard), the mere 
power of perceiving the thoughts and feelings of others 
adds immensely to the number of received impressions, i.e., 
of possible motives. What other people think or feel 
about us or about our conduct becomes a motive at a very 
early stage, and when we have once begun to feel an 



other people's feelings, it is an easy step to extend the con- 
cern to their feelings about other topics than the sympathiser. 

The power which men have of acting upon, or of enter- 
ing into each other's feelings, is real, natural, and imper- 
fectly developed ; we believe a tendency towards its further 
development to be also natural and real, and the conscious- 
ness of its existence as the most essential characteristic 
of man as man to be the source of all our moral ideas. A 
few thousand years are not much in the history of a species, 
and the power of sympathetic passion and moral action — 
or action towards a good made such by human feeling — 
are still, we hold, engaged in evolutionary throes. Men 
wish to act and feel together, but they have not yet learned 
how to do so, except imperfectly and with effort. Altru- 
ism in some shape or other is so essential a part of civil- 
ised social life that it does not occur to us to regard some 
of its more ordinary manifestations as moral. Tyranny, 
ambition, emulation, all the passions that are most active 
in leading to the exploitation of man by man, are rudi- 
mentary forms of altruism, expressions of the impulse that 
drives every one to try to enlarge his own life by appro- 
priating, dominating, or identifying himself with the lives 
of those around him. The men who built the Pyramids 




concern in anything so remote from self as 



228 



NATURAL LAW. 



were certainly not egotists ; and the submission of their 
subjects, the consent which is the condition of all 
dominion, is still more clearly altruistic; the great pro- 
blem of history, how on the side of the oppressors there 
was power — to oppress the most mighty many — is to be 
solved, not by such a contradiction in terms as is involved in 
the physical coercion of the many by the few, of the strong 
by the weak, but by the habitual weakness of purely selfish 
ambitions in the majority, and their willingness to identify 
themselves with the aims and sympathise with the wishes 
of any one whose wishes are strong enough to carry with 
him the minds and wills of his tools ; and if men can thus 
be carried captive by each other's baser cupidities, they may 
in like manner be subjugated by the power of disinterested 
aspirations. 

The moral progress of society consists in a growing har- 
mony between the feeling of different centres of conscious- 
ness, or between the personal feeling of each ego and its 
representation of external feelings. The tyrannical altruist 
insists on effecting the harmony by modifying the attitude 
of the subject mind, or controlling its tendencies ; the 
sympathetic altruist desires the harmony of feeling as the 
chief end, and rather than prolong the discord, submits to 
take an uncongenial impression. The stronger will, if not 
naturally bad, i.e., irreconcilable with the general tenden- 
cies of society and nature (in which case resistance to it is 
moral), compels the more imaginative, emotional, or affec- 
tionate nature to follow its lead, rather than inflict the 
pain of arrested power and impeded tendency on innocent 
involuntary egotism. The rational altruist, on the other 
hand, endeavours to give effect to the best will, whether 
it be his own or another's : if his own, not for that reason, 
but for the sake of the good result ; if another's, not from 
the blind instinct of sympathy, but from enlightened 
identity of purpose. The importance of sympathy as a 
motive lies rather in its power to multiply the range of 
inducement for acts naturally indifferent by the inter- 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF ALTRUISM. 229 

change of borrowed motive, than in the essential morality 
of other-selfishness ; but at the same time, to have pre- 
sent to the mind a strong wish, of another person, that can 
be gratified with no other sacrifice than that of a weaker 
wish of our own, is to be conscious of a share in the moral 
life of the social organism ; and though the happiness of 
one man is of no more account to nature than that of 
another, the sum total of natural good is clearly greater if 
disinterested energy and innocent enjoyment coexist by 
favour of each other, than if energy is limited to self- 
chosen ends, and enjoyment limited by self-possessed 
powers. Just as in personal morality the ambitious im- 
pulses may overrule the indolent aversion to labour, as 
pride or vanity may control intemperance, so tenderness 
towards the fond desire of a weaker friend, mere compas- 
sion for another's pain, the will for a result that some one 
else can reach if enough self-sacrificing industry is placed 
at his command, are all motive forces as powerful within 
the consciousness as if they were merely self-regarding in 
their results, and they impose an obligation so irresistible 
when it is felt at all, that we seem to escape a danger as 
we reflect that such a force cannot, in the nature of things, 
be brought habitually to bear against the common good. 

The passion for living is too strong to be satisfied with 
the actions or enjoyments physically possible to one indi- 
vidual; men do not think of the infinite as a possession 
to be desired for its own sake, but their desires are infi- 
nitely expansive, and, it may be, most vast and comprehen- 
sive when least distinct and irresistible. Egotism calls 
the imagination to its help, and enriches the single life 
by representing it as existing, magnified, embellished, or 
at least repeated, in innumerable other consciousnesses. 
When people cannot add materially to their own powers, 
pleasures, or possessions, they try to add to them ideally 
by becoming conscious of other persons' apprehension of 
their existence, extent, and attractiveness ; and it is but a 
step from taking pleasure in the thought that others share 



230 NATURAL LAW. 

our consciousness of the advantages we really enjoy, to 
trying to make their belief in our enjoyment, especially of 
power, a substitute for consciousness of its real possession, 
should that prove the more difficult of attainment. In 
emulation, or the desire of " going beyond " other people, 
the object is not primarily to do more than somebody else, 
only to do much, but " much " can only be estimated by 
a standard that seems to include another's " little." There 
is no object in doing more than other people of the same 
kind, unless the kind of action is good : " excellence," 
etymologically a term of comparison, owes its complimen- 
tary connotation to the fact that the unit, or standard, in 
other people's practice is assumed to be positively good. 
As Proudhon used to say, most social wrongs are based 
upon an erreur de comjpte, and it is only a miscalculation 
that leads the ambitious egotist to substitute the shadow 
for the reality as an object of pursuit, and to be content 
with less of positive achievement than he might secure 
himself, while hindering the achievement of others, to 
maintain a perfectly unprofitable, comparative ascendency. 
The beginning of egotism is the desire for sympathy, or 
rather the desire for sympathy is a refinement of egotism : 
the pleasure of being thought strong, or wise, or beautiful 
adds something to the pleasure found in being so really ; 
and it is an easy mistake to imagine that the second plea- 
sure may be enjoyed without the first, and at less expense, 
if we disguise ourselves, and cheat or plagiarise. 

The imagination in general is neither more nor less 
moral than the impulses in its suggestions ; the real 
motive for any action is what the whole mind, or as much 
of it as is brought to bear upon the matter, feels and judges 
about it ; but this conclusion is affected not only by the 
real strength of competing inducements, but also by the 
comparative ease with which their respective force can 
be brought home to the imagination. Some independent 
faculty, such as reason, has to be called in to arbitrate 
when it is necessary to decide between such different in- 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF ALTRUISM. 231 



ducements as a present pleasure to be set against a future 
pain, or a present pain to be followed by a future pleasure. 
The imagination is sluggish even in reproducing past ex- 
periences, and when really incommensurable motives are 
brought before it — as, for example, the pleasures of sin, 
and the pains of everlasting damnation — the result will 
be arbitrarily determined by the susceptibility of the sub- 
ject to one class of images rather than another. The 
imagination furnishes motives for action when sensible 
appetites or physical impulses are inadequate, but it is only 
with culture and education that it becomes so realistic as 
to make it probable that all the inducements it holds forth 
may have a real existence; then it serves to give effect to 
those inducements that are real, only not actually present 
to sense, and these have a rudimentary or provisional 
disinterestedness. Prudence, for instance, or the taking 
thought for the morrow, is almost more truly the begin- 
ning of altruism than vanity or affection ; our future self 
is another than our present, and to be willing to make 
sacrifices for its advantage proves that the representative 
life of intellect and emotion has begun to encroach upon 
and control the presentations of sense. The reason that 
so many of these natural developments of ego-altruism 
appear at times unamiable, or practically mischievous, is 
that, as aforesaid, men act as they can, not as they would, 
and make up their ideas of the intention they seek to 
realise as they go along, resolving while they act, and not 
discovering till after the event, nor indeed always then, 
what the consequences direct and remote of the action 
may be. 

The immense majority of the pleasures indulged in by 
civilised adults are reducible to the satisfaction found in 
following normal impulses, or exercising natural faculties 
in the pursuit of ideal ends. The satisfaction of success 
as such is the same whatever the end proposed, and all 
ideal ends are alike unselfish, whether the choice of 
them is dictated by fancy, convention, or a moral con- 



232 



NATURAL LAW. 



sciousness of the necessity for compromise between dif- 
ferent natural impulses. The multiplication of human 
faculties and the tendencies inciting to their exercise, 
which accompanies the growing complexity of social life, 
causes an ever larger proportion of civilised conduct to 
fall under the direction of disinterested will, instead of 
immediate personal desire, and we hope may even end by 
substituting direct personal desires for the good of all for 
isolated, self-regarding aims. 

Most of the troubles of society arise from a miscalcula- 
tion which is commonly made at this point, owing to the 
will having outgrown the reason, as well as the passions ; 
or more exactly, as the will is properly the expression of 
the whole nature, owing to the supremacy within the 
nature of the active impulses over the intellect and the 
affections. In the early years or centuries of a progres- 
sive society, the ends which are sought by an increasing 
variety of means, are still only the ends desired by the 
natural man, namely, ease, enjoyment, and opportunity 
for pleasurable action. Now, as all action is in itself indif- 
ferent, and the actions performable by men practically 
infinite, while they can learn to take a faint pleasure in 
whichever they learn to perform successfully, it is evident 
that had men known beforehand which actions each mem- 
ber of the society would have to perform in order to 
secure himself and every other member in the peaceable 
exercise of as many natural faculties as possible, no selfish 
interest was concerned to prevent the harmonious com- 
pact. But they did not know. All began to follow natu- 
ral innocent tendencies of their own, and the tendencies 
shortly began to come into collision. "When sensible 
pleasures were concerned, there was a common ground, and 
simple personal rights were easily established by law or 
custom. The growth of the everyday virtues of temper- 
ance, honesty, industry, and politene s s is perfectly intelli- 
gible as the result of growing social relations, which could 
only be made easy and permanent by their exercise ; the 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF ALTRUISM. 233 



general interest was not always present as a motive for 
the good behaviour of the individual, whose susceptibility, 
in fact, was by no means always so developed as to have 
made the conception of such interests a practical induce- 
ment ; but the general set of motive power was in favour 
of the virtues being exercised, always, everywhere, and by 
every one, even when personal reasons were wanting to 
bribe the egotist to their exercise then and there.* 

Knowledge with its unvarying impartiality extends the 
narrow range of feeling, and the law which a man wishes 
to impose on his fellows, the constant formula of their 
duty to him which he ventures to proclaim, imposes itself 
on his own will as the natural and binding rule, unless 
his imagination is of the erratic quality, able to conceive 
the rest of the world as it really is, and himself as he is 
not, i.e., independent of its general laws. But tendencies 
not immediately and visibly injurious to a man's neigh- 
bours, may, for that very reason, be followed unimpeded 
till the power of following them has become pleasurable, 
and the act of doing so a habit, painful to break. The 
individual then becomes selfishly attached to the pursuit 
of an intrinsically indifferent end, so that we may find the 
habit of a disinterested energy once formed and main- 
tained without reference to rational inducements, simulat- 
ing the appearance and producing the effects of an in- 
conceivably insatiable egotism. To take a single, most 
obvious illustration : the pursuit of wealth is the principal 
and most absorbing occupation in modern societies, and it 
is a commonplace to observe that the pursuit becomes an 
end in itself to most of those who engage in it, though 
the enjoyment of possession is in the main symbolical. 
Millionaires go on adding automatically to their wealth, 
because their education has been too imperfect to suggest 
to them any useful or ornamental ways of diminishing it ; 
and men who are so entirely at a loss for any intelligent 
employment for their money, that they delegate the task 
of throwing it away to their wives or sons, would yet 



234 



NATURAL LAW. 



resist with fervour any social changes that promised to 
make their labour less superfluously lucrative. 

We should have good reason to despair of the social 
fabric if it were necessary for its safety that we should 
succeed in persuading the majority, or even a considerable 
minority of men, to act habitually in a way opposed to 
their own nature and desires. Such a task involves a 
logical contradiction as well as a moral impossibility. But 
nature can be educated, and desires are eminently variable ; 
it is only when one desire has grown into a monomania, as 
the love of money with a miser, that reason has no hold 
upon the mind to suggest limits and conditions to be 
observed in its gratification. To most men the ruling 
passion, however strong it may be, still does not stand 
absolutely alone in the mind, other disinterested impulses 
coexist with it, and only the mental habit of giving prece- 
dence to one class of motives, not their greater natural 
pleasurableness, is answerable for the blind persistency 
with which men spend money for that which is not bread, 
and their labour for that which satisfieth not. As M. 
Littre observes, the chief use of education is to multiply 
motives for action ; for to have many faculties is to have 
many impulses, to have many impulses is to be accessible 
to many motives, and to be accessible to many motives is 
to be in communication with many of the influences of the 
Not-self, instead of being bound in unreasoning constancy 
to one form of mechanical energising. 

Most people are imperfect rather than bad, ignorant 
rather than perverse, their will is not radically depraved, 
but they do not see, or think, or feel, the whole real world 
only touches upon stray corners of their minds ; they are 
but fractions of men, and need a providence to protect 
them, severally and conjointly, against the dangerous 
energy of fractions, acting blindly as if they were wholes. 
We are apt to take life too easily, forgetting for how many 
centuries human hands and brains have been at work to 
make it fruitfully hard; to rest satisfied with a narrow 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF ALTRUISM. 23$ 



automatic compliance with the machinery of the society in 
which we live, forgetting that the machinery is all living 
and plastic, that the parts have to find their own place, to 
fit themselves together, to discover their own work, and 
that the machine has to regulate itself. Something more 
than disinterestedness is wanted here, for a society in 
which every one spent his time in seeking the advantage 
of somebody else might rival modern Europe in anarchy 
unless it had more intelligence in its service, while with 
sufficient intelligence it would probably come harmoni- 
ously to a dead-lock, since no one would have any interest 
of his own for the others to serve. As it has been ob- 
served, however, selfishness, in the evil sense, consists not 
" in a man's love to his own happiness, but in placing that 
happiness in things confined to himself; " and since no one 
really does, or can place his happiness in things confined 
to himself, it is evident that what society wants is not so 
much benevolence as common sense, not so much devotion 
as right reason, to lead its members to substitute, if neces- 
sary, for one set of indifferent actions, or one disinterested 
end, another set not more indifferent or disinterested, but 
more conducive to the common good. 

The heightened sense of his own individuality which 
comes with the first widening of his mental horizon, leads 
the half-civilised man to conceive himself as the centre of 
the universe, which he thinks is only there to minister to 
his purposes. But as his knowledge extends and his sym- 
pathies become more various, he discovers that he can be 
affected by much that he cannot use, and act upon much 
that he cannot enjoy. This glimpse of a wider existence 
which it seems like a kind of suicide to renounce, co-oper- 
ates with the other discovery which we have seen to be 
equally natural, and perhaps still more inevitable, that the 
universe is by no means chiefly concerned in ministering to 
the personal convenience or inclination of its inhabitants. 
The pleasures of passion are found to be uncertain or un- 
attainable, just as the pleasures of faculty are found to be 



236 



NATURAL LAW. 



infinitely various and rather more than coextensive with 
the field for virtuous effort. The only source of pleasure 
connected with the more complex, artificial faculties is the 
pleasure of exercise, and all such exercises of faculty imply 
a multiplied altruism — concern with and subjection to 
many things and persons beside the self. But at the pre- 
sent stage in the world's history, in this nineteenth century, 
the free exercise of natural faculties is fraught with so 
many and distant consequences that to act much and yet 
to act always reasonably, that is, so as not to defeat the 
ends of any of the proposed actions by each other, has 
become so dinicult that, since action after all is natural, to 
guide action by reason has become the supreme, almost the 
one needful, virtue. Season has no power to invent mo- 
tives, and no grounds to go upon in giving effect to one 
natural tendency rather than another, or to all rather than 
a few, if the subject of the tendency has no will, that is, if 
there is no conscious tendency pre-existing for the reason 
to direct. As a fact, however, men have a natural ten- 
dency to exert whatever natural faculties they possess, 
and reason has quite employment enough in guiding each 
real faculty into the channel in which its exercise will 
interfere least with other tendencies of equal strength and 
authority. And since the will is throughout disinterested, 
enlightened reason draws no distinction between the ten- 
dencies of the self and of other men ; for the casual attach- 
ment of what we may call self -mill to an end in no way 
peculiarly suited to the nature of the whole man is emi- 
nently ephemeral, its duration could not be calculated 
upon even if it were desired. The reason then agrees with 
the religiously disposed will in proposing to itself as an 
end the realisation or fulfilment of all the tendencies it 
discerns in nature in proportion to their strength or reality, 
and while it has no bias in favour of distinctively altruistic 
or benevolent impulses over egotistic or self-indulgent ones, 
the fact that all pleasures, except those of sense (which are 
inadequate to motive more than the simplest acts of life), 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF ALTRUISM. 237 



have an altruistic element, namely, the desire for sympathy, 
and that some, as sympathy with the pleasures enjoyed by 
others, are entirely altruistic, warrants the conclusion that 
nature is at one with morality in the tendency to merge 
the particular in the universal good. 

One life, our own, is too little for the least of us ; we 
seek to impart our consciousness, our thoughts as well as 
our feelings, to others, and to receive back the impression 
of their consciousness as a part of our own, a fresh element 
in our personality, making us by so much the more alive. 
But while, on the one hand, we try to enrich our life by 
expansion and comprehension, by spreading it out in space 
and making concern for ourselves in the doings of others, 
of which it was not even necessary for us to know, on the 
other hand, our consciousness seeks, as it were, to in- 
tegrate itself in time and maintain the continuity of its 
perceptions of yesterday and to-morrow. It is this in- 
stinctive desire to make life an organic whole that revolts 
against the glorification of pleasures that perish, as all 
sensible pleasures do, in the moment of possession, over 
the complex intellectual, and emotional states that pass, 
perhaps in a moment of comparative indifference, from 
anticipation to memory, and are as enjoyable in one as in 
the other shape. Knowledge by itself adds nothing to our 
desires, except to our desire for more knowledge ; fresh 
powers ask no gratification except scope for their exercise, 
and the appetites, which cannot help us in our main 
aspiration, to make life rich, full, continuous, one, even 
if their strength remains otherwise unimpaired, come to 
occupy less of us in proportion. The power to enjoy 
becomes weakened by use and deadened by exercise, which 
makes enjoyment a habit, and as the habit of enjoyment 
becomes inveterate, its indulgence becomes increasingly 
difficult, and even laborious, and, labour for labour, the 
reason prefers a toil that is not spent in defeating its own 
ends. 

It must not, of course, be supposed that a rationalised 



2 3 8 



NATURAL LAW. 



account of existing practices has any but the faintest 
tendency to make practice more rational than it was 
"before. To know what we are doing, and why we began 
to do it, is not a reason for ceasing from the deed, but 
neither is it a reason for persisting in it with more ardour 
than the original motive had inspired. The confusion 
between the speculative and the hortatory elements in 
most moral treatises is due, as before observed, to the fact 
that every one is really agreed in thinking morality good, 
and that, therefore, theories of the nature of morality 
expect to seem convincing in proportion to the success 
with which they represent its excellence to the imagina- 
tion. The correctness of a theory of virtue is not unrea- 
sonably thought to be shown and proved by its practical 
influence in making its adherents virtuous. But though 
virtuous conduct is substantially the same with every one, 
the motives that prevail with each individual in his moral 
resolves will be as various as his opinions respecting the 
comparative desirability of different ends. If nobody 
could be good except the adherents of a sound ethical 
system, virtue would perhaps not exist at all, or else it 
would be the monopoly of a single sect. The manifest 
absurdity of claiming such a monopoly for the small school 
of scientific atheists obliges the theory to be content with 
tracing the virtue of atheists and theists to a common 
root, without pretending to furnish either class, much less 
Loth, with one motive of universal application and unfail- 
ing effect. 

"We only claim to have given a ground of common 
sense and plain reason to a few ethical commonplaces, 
which without such ground are open to suspicion as 
edifying prejudices. Such brief and trite results had 
need to be self-evident. The whole duty of man, we say, is 
to live a sane and ample life in harmony with his fellows. 
He does no wrong who lives sanely and innocently; he 
does right who not only lives well himself but furthers the 
efforts of others to live well likewise. It is not well to 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF ALTRUISM. 239 



live unhappily, but it is not wrong to prefer the happiness 
of others to our own, and it is supremely right to prefer 
the good of others, as well as our own good, to our own 
happiness or enjoyment. This is the sum and substance 
of the moral law, which suffers neither change nor diminu- 
tion from the particular facts included in our moral expe- 
riences. 

Those men who are all incoherent impulse and ignorant 
desire — and every theory of morality must recognise the 
existence of individuals possessing little moral strength or 
stability — are habitually overborne by the current of more 
methodical energy, and leave few heirs to their infirmity 
of will. Those who have coherent, if not altogether 
intellectual desires, pursue in the main persistently the 
course that promises to secure their gratification, and 
adapt themselves almost unconsciously to the conditions 
which their place in society imposes on the pursuit ; each 
class, like each individual, works out a morality of its 
own from some fixed starting-point of impulse growing 
into use, and none of the impulses capable of being fol- 
lowed with disinterested moral resolution are in them- 
selves bad, only, as was observed of the legalisation of 
class custom, no one impulse is a safe guide in its own 
cause, and classes with a ruling impulse not much con- 
trolled by intelligence are apt to act in a way that their 
present sympathies would lead them to call immoral 
if they realised more clearly what it was. Moral remon- 
strances cannot make humane impulses or sympathetic 
emotions where they do not exist, and where they do 
exist, morality exists implicitly, in premises that may be 
appealed to and built upon with confidence. Ignorance, 
not disinterested malice, is the arch- foe to the wellbeinii 
of society, and without any addition to the purely social 
virtues or to the conscientiousness of individuals, the 
effect upon the will of fresh knowledge or a clearer percep- 
tion of facts before but dimly apprehended, may be entirely 
moral in result, though no other sanctions than the natural 



24-0 



NATURAL LAW. 



consequences of the action are present to enforce its per- 
formance or omission. 

But — if we have succeeded in showing the origin of 
human ideas respecting the just, the obligatory, and the 
good to be entirely natural and their existence necessary — 
critics, who are not quite satisfied with the premises that 
allow of such a conclusion being reached, will perhaps 
retort, as sceptics are wont to do to the orthodox upholders 
of established truth, by asking for an explanation, no 
longer of the origin of good, but for that of evil, not how 
virtue is possible, but why imperfection is real. 

The human intellect is incapable of formulating or 
" "understanding any other reason why a thing is thus or 
thus, than a full, true, and particular account of how it is, 
in itself and in relation to all the other things that are. 
The origin of evil is the existence of things imperfect 
after their kind, and each separate concrete case of imper- 
fection has a long history which accounts to the reason for 
the precise degree of imperfection observed to be a fact ; 
but concerning anything antecedent to the beginning of the 
history — that is to say, any process or state genericaily alien 
to whatever may be apprehended or represented by sense, 
thought, or imagination — rational thought and sane ima- 
gination observe an absolute and unbroken silence ; not 
that science has come to the end of the knowable, or that 
existing forms of thought are final and inexpansive, but 
that whatever we know and think has at least the one 
quality in common, that it is known and thought by men, 
and is therefore not antecedent to the real, historical con- 
ditions of human knowledge and thought. 

It is a fact that things of various degrees of perfection 
exist, and the consciousness of his own existence, which 
is most strongly marked in man, takes in him the form of 
an affirmation by the will of the precise degree of perfec- 
tion actually attained at any moment. The will is not a 
lawgiver imposing a constant course of action on some- 
thing different from itself; an act of will is the declaration 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF ALTRUISM. 241 



by the individual of that which it is natural to him to do 
under the circumstances actually existing, and this decla- 
ration is determined or conditioned by the nature of the 
individual and the circumstances conjointly ; it states the 
relation existing between them in a single case, such as, if 
constantly recurring, would form a law. The most gene- 
ral statement that we can easily make about the effect on 
the human will and human affections of the objective 
pressure of social motives is, to say that they determine a 
moral liking or preference for those actions and feelings 
which are best at the same time for the ego concerned and 
for other human beings, best for the two parties in their 
real relation, or in other words, those which establish be- 
tween them the best of possible constant relations ; while 
there is an incalculably stronger presumption in favour of 
the best for both being realised if the immediate object of 
pursuit is the good of others than if it is the personal good 
of the agent. Duty speaks with the lawful authority of 
many voices ; pleasure has no strength except in the long- 
ing desire of the hungry unit, who, in the immense majo- 
rity of cases, is capable of attaining to a direct perception 
of the comparative weakness of the force embodied in 
himself, when that force is not in harmony with the exter- 
nal demands of surrounding facts ; and in all these cases 
the rational and moral nature of the man puts itself, some- 
times deliberately, sometimes automatically, on the side 
which in a superficial sense is certainly " other " than its 
own. 

The truly lawful conduct is motived, in the double 
sense which that word will bear, by inducement as well 
as instigation, because there is an affirmation by the feel- 
ings of the effect produced, answering to the affirmation by 
the will of the action taken, when both are in all respects 
normal, i.e., when the natural tendencies of the agent and 
of the environment coincide. And Nemesis, the only god 
who indeed bears a hand, heavy and hard, in appointing 
the lives of men — Nemesis orders things so that, by acts 

Q 



242 



NATURAL LAW. 



which are contrary to the natural law of virtuous effort, 
the doer of them is brought into painful collision with the 
work of the saner tendencies around. Nemesis, indeed, is 
but the name under which we personify these recurring 
experiences of collision, whereby there forces itself upon 
the transgressor, either as a timely warning or a late judg- 
ment, the direct consciousness of real, constant, irresistible 
power in nature — a power of life and of death for men, 
buo most especially of life to those who have the will to 
live lawfully, and of death, temporal and spiritual, to all 
who set their hearts on disobedience. And every frag- 
mentary glimpse we get of this supreme tendency of 
nature towards self-assertion serves to sanction some 
special law of human conduct or feeling. 



VI. 



THE NATURAL SANCTIONS OF 
MORALITY. 



"Even the wise and good have a fear in them which is an instrument of 
justice and religion ; ... it is a fear that is natural, a fear produced from the 
congenite notices of things, and the fear of doing a base thing ; a fear to be a 
fool and an evil person."— Jeremy Taylor. 

"Every hour," answered the princess, "confirms my prejudice in favour 
of the position so often uttered by the mouth of Imlac : ' That nature sets 
her gifts on the right hand and on the left.' "— Johnson. 



Causes and effects inseparable; so the dislike felt for the natural conse- 
quences of an immoral act, which in itself is pleasant or temptingly 
easy, acts as a sanction to enforce the law against it — The natural law 
against murder, theft, inconstancy, and suicide — "Waste of moral force 
in the exercises of false religions — Doctrine of remission of sins an im- 
moral evasion of the painful stringency of the natural sanction, that a 
wrong cannot be undone, though atoned and amended — Remorse tbe 
consciousness of having acted against the true nature — That human 
nature is thus and thus is the efficient, not the final cause of the con- 
scious tendency or moral will to live according to nature. 



THE NATURAL SANCTIONS OF MORALITY. 



The penal sanctions by which the injunctions of natural 
morality are enforced are the objective counterpart to the 
influence of natural motives or inducements, in strength- 
ening the conscious tendency of will by the half-imagina- 
tive, half-intellectual consciousness of desire. The causal 
antecedents of a voluntary act are also the conditions of 
the general mental disposition which makes the end or 
natural effect of the action appear desirable, if it is re- 
flected upon at all ; but the reflection, if it occurs, is a new 
condition, which confirms to some extent the previous 
tendency towards efficient action. There is a double 
assurance for the performance of any given rational action 
(or act implying the adjustment of means to an end) when 
the individual is resolved upon the end as well as the 
means, and there is a similar security against the perform- 
ance of actions naturally uncongenial to the will, in the 
power of reason to foresee that the consequences of such 
actions will be even more distasteful to the whole nature 
of the subject than the action itself. The effects of 
any action follow certainly and necessarily upon it, and 
human desire or wish is not a force by which the nature 
of things or their property of producing given results 
under given conditions can be modified or controlled. 
There is a natural necessity upon men, if they will the 
attainment of any particular end, to will the steps by 
which it is naturally possible to reach it, and to refrain 
from willing the means that lead naturally to results 



246 



NATURAL LAW. 



that they are seriously resolved or desirous not to pro- 
duce. 

The subjection of man, as a conscious and rational 
agent, no less than as a material organism, to the laws 
of nature, consists in the fact that he is habitually bound 
by other powers than his own will to certain classes of 
actions; the sanctions which conspire with the regular 
action of natural causes to make the actions of men more 
constant than their desires are not themselves the most 
important element in the law, because they only take 
effect when a rule has been broken, or when — as in most 
cases contemplated by moralists — it is supposed that the 
will would break the rule it normally follows, but for a 
rational expectation that the breach of the rule would 
entail consequences which the will is not prepared to face. 
The sanctions have a practical, occasional value, but their 
existence is not the cause, even in the latter class of cases, 
of the obedience habitually paid to the moral law, since 
the compulsion they exercise is only alternative, and it 
is the disposition of the will, or the whole nature of the 
individual, that determines which motives will have an 
attractive, and what sanctions an efficiently deterrent influ- 
ence upon his mind and conduct. 

The natural sanction of the natural law against murder 
is the impossibility of bringing the dead to life. A 
momentary act of angry violence may cause the brother 
who was only hated for a moment to be lost for ever; 
hence the necessity for controlling violent impulses be- 
comes apparent to the will, which has no abstract delight 
in violence, and, other things being equal, from the first 
dawn of society, slightly prefer the life of other members 
of the community to their death. The natural sanction of 
the natural law against theft is the impossibility of two 
people enjoying exclusive possession of the same object 
at the same time, while some degree of security in the 
possession of needful instruments is essential to any long 
course of rational action towards ends, such as civilised 



THE NATURAL SANCTIONS OF MORALITY. 247 



life is principally made up of. The natural sanction of 
the natural law in favour of veracity is the impossibility 
of sustained intercourse without reciprocal trust. The 
natural sanctions enforcing personal sobriety are self- 
evident. The natural sanction of the obligation of parents 
to provide for their children is the simple fact that infants 
perish if not supplied with food and shelter; and when 
the instinctive tendency of animals to nourish their young 
(without which no brute species would live through two 
generations) has been so far weakened amongst men that 
the alternative of deliberately destroying children that it 
is inconvenient to rear, can be entertained and adopted, 
the sanction operates with respect to the children whom it 
is determined to preserve. 1 

It has been doubted by some secular moralists whether 
there is any natural sanction enforcing the law by which 
monogamy is prescribed, as we find, historically, that it 
has been in most states possessing an advanced and 
balanced civilisation. Godwin, whose " Political Justice " 
contains, under the head of "Inferences from the doc- 
trine of necessity," much admirably humane and rational 
morality, proposed to abolish marriage altogether, and as 
society is almost unanimous in thinking Godwin ill- 
advised on this point, one of the strongest of the argu- 
menta ad hominem commonly used against free-thinking 
refers to a supposed connection between theological and 
conjugal infidelity. If — as writers like Godwin were half 
inclined to believe — priests invented gods in order to 
make the birth, death, and burial of their dupes the 
occasion for elaborate ceremonies profitable to themselves, 
they might be supposed to have invented marriage as 
well as divers other sacraments, in order to make their 
influence felt at every important juncture of life. But if 

1 It is found in India that even female children, if not exposed at birth, 
are never afterwards destroyed, being sufficiently protected, we may pre- 
sume, by the ordinary reluctance of men to sacrifice a life that has become 
to some extent, through habit, if not affection, a part of their own. 



243 



NATURAL LAW. 



we take a less extreme view of the fertility of trie human 
imagination and its power of baseless invention, we may 
suppose, as has been done in the preceding pages, that 
the crudest religious belief has something answering to 
it in nature and fact, and shall infer that a contract of 
marriage must have been an event of considerable natural 
and secular importance before it could occur to religious 
functionaries to treat it as sacramental. 

When the legal, moral, and religious aspects of cus- 
tomary ordinances were confused and interchangeable, 
only those ordinances were conceived as mainly and pri- 
marily religious which were of such general application as 
to rank almost with the real influences of the Not-self 
upon the natural life of every member of the community. 
If we do not allow religion to be of supernatural origin or 
power, it cannot have lent a supernatural sanctity to the 
marriage tie ; and if respect for that tie is almost as uni- 
versal as religion, its existence must be almost as univer- 
sally natural. The rationalists, who ignore this inference, 
do so, no doubt, because early habit and the constant 
assertions of the orthodox lead them to accept as logical 
and inevitable the connection which has prevailed histori- 
cally between the established religion of all countries and 
their marriage laws, so that if the one is subverted the 
other is supposed to share in its condemnation. But it 
does not follow that, because monogamy ceases to be 
regarded as a religious duty, some form of polygamy will 
certainly be adopted in any society where naturalistic 
views of morality and religion come to prevail. There 
are reasons of general validity that would lead many per- 
sons, whatever their theological views, to prefer — if they 
could secure it — a freehold in the affections of their 
nearest friend to a mere tenancy at will ; and though the 
passions are not sufficiently rational to be directly affected 
by the knowledge of the consequences that follow natu- 
rally from their unrestrained indulgence, any real emo- 
tion, while it is real, is ipso facto a force tending to ex- 



THE NATURAL SANCTIONS OF MORALITY. 249 



elude from the consciousness any fresh passion incom- 
patible with itself. The emotions are natural, and their 
real strength necessary and irresistible ; but since life is 
not providentially adjusted so as to make the indulgence 
of every natural tendency easy, or all coexisting tenden- 
cies harmonious, it is impossible but that the necessity of 
sacrificing one natural feeling to another should sometimes 
arise. It is because such sacrifices cannot be effected by 
a single deliberate act of will that, in spite of their occa- 
sional necessity, they are felt to stand on a different foot- 
ing from ordinary moral acts or efforts. 

To love or hate unwisely is a moral imperfection of 
the same innocent, incorrigible sort as to have and act 
upon ideas of moral duty such as the mass of mankind 
agree to think erroneous ; while the passion is felt, and 
the conscientious belief entertained, it cannot, strictly 
speaking, be called right for the individual to become false 
to either, 1 in act or thought. Only as human perfection 
does not consist in the supremacy of any one faculty or 
class of impulses, but in the balanced and harmonious 
development of all, it is not open to consistent rationalists 
to proclaim the natural autocracy of any one passion, how- 
ever universal or potent in its influence. If we consent, 
as rationalists must, to judge humanity only by itself, we 
must allow that it is an imperfection to fail in intelligence 
or moral strength of character, as well as to fail in that 
sensitiveness to moral impressions which is the source of 
emotional affections. Neither defect can be remedied by 
a simple act of will ; but supposing the individual to have 
become conscious of the defect, and desirous for its re- 
moval, there is a reaction of the whole nature upon the 
single faculty that is deficient, which stimulates its de- 
velopment, and indirectly favours its exercise. Nothing 
can make the affections in themselves rational — though, 
on the average, people are loved for amiable traits — just 

1 A thesis dramatically illustrated in Mr. Browning's poem, " The 
Statue and the Bust." 



250 



NATURAL LAW. 



as nothing can turn abstract reasoning into a motive force 
■ — though efficient motives are, on the average, active in 
the direction of deliberately chosen ends ; but the affec- 
tions are the stronger for having their natural movements 
confirmed by reason, just as thought is the more varied, 
and impulse the more energetic, when the two unite to 
supply one the matter, the other the form, of rational 
action. Each single tendency is weak and short-lived by 
itself; it requires preserving, propping, continuing, and 
reinforcing by finding itself at one with other harmo- 
niously parallel tendencies. The will or reason cannot 
argue away a real affection by practical or prudential con- 
siderations, but they can and do show it to be, in the 
natural and secular sense of the words, both wise and 
right to take care, so to speak, of certain affections, to pro- 
tect and cherish them, to let their indulgence borrow 
strength from habit, and guarantee their durability by a 
foregone conclusion that they ought to be permanent. 

The natural sanction that visits all inconstancy, and 
especially inconstancy in the most serious passion of life, 
derives its deterrent force from the craving men have to 
give continuity, organic completeness to their life, to affi- 
liate their sentiments, to make their best emotions fruitful 
of hopes and memories. If the natural emotions of men 
who look before and after could only repeat at stated in- 
tervals the same short, absorbing, and monotonous story of 
passion, satiety, and weary indifference, which after each 
repetition is shorter, less absorbing, and more monotonous 
than before, the rational will would perhaps adopt the 
ascetic view, which treats all the natural passions as 
intrinsically evil. But if no natural tendencies are in 
themselves evil or naturally self-destructive, it must be 
possible for the exclusive and passionate attachment con- 
secrated in the ideal marriage to fit itself in amongst all the 
other interests, engagements, and relations of life, as one 
element amongst many, making up a coherent and com- 
plete whole ; and if this has once been accomplished, and 



THE NATURAL SANCTIONS OF MORALITY. 251 



the accomplishment recorded in consciousness, no after- 
incident of natural infirmity or external seduction can 
make it appear altogether good to the individual will to 
sacrifice a part of itself and its history to instincts that 
have neither past nor future. 

It will perhaps be objected that such general considera- 
tions as these are too remote to influence the will to any 
practical sacrifice of inclination, and in fact their effect 
would naturally be felt rather in controlling inclination 
than action, which is a further confirmation of the view 
that the emotions have more in common with religion than 
with morality. But the general belief referred to is the 
source of the natural cogency in this case of what may be 
called the social sanction, or the expression of opinion by 
the community, which in all moral dilemmas gives weight 
and additional efficacy to the promptings of the individual 
conscience. It is scarcely reasonable to expect that any 
legislation, however liberal, or any society, however toler- 
ant, should have power to efface the natural difference 
observable between persons who have and those who have 
not made a serious mistake in one of the most important 
affairs of life. Of course nearly all human mistakes may 
be repaired, or made the best of, but the natural sanction 
by which men are reminded to exercise all the moral fore- 
thought that they can, is the fact from which there is no 
escaping, that, though it is better to repair a mistake than 
to persist in it, it is, humanly speaking, still better not 
to make mistakes that need to be repaired. Positive 
law has nothing to do with the natural, almost logical 
impossibility that a couple married after ten or twenty 
divorces by mutual consent should seem to themselves or 
to society to be as indissolubly united at last as Philemon 
and Baucis or John Anderson and his goodwife. Positive 
law has nothing to do with the general belief that the per- 
fection of the marriage union is to be complete and abso- 
lute — while it lasts — and it has nothing to do with the 
necessity by which a complete and absolute union appears 



252 



NATURAL LAW. 



naturally indissoluble ; or rather, it has as much to do with 
these as with any other natural practices and opinions ; its 
function is to declare their regularity and necessity. 

Any propensity, if indulged to excess, tends to cut off 
its own springs of enjoyment in the healthy power of the 
whole organism; and the natural sanction which warns 
every normal appetite to respect the demands of the rest, 
is the experience that only the healthy, or evenly deve- 
loped nature has life and freshness enough to return again 
and again to its familiar pleasures, and find them always 
the same, that is, always newly pleasant ; while the man 
of one passion, or of one idea, needs to make that one ever 
more intense or more fantastical to compensate for the 
growing dulness of his sensibilities, arising from the atrophy 
of every faculty hut the one. And what is true of appetites 
applies, mutatis mutandis, to impulses, which can only 
survive if followed, with conscious or instinctive prudence, 
in such wise as not to land their subject at a point beyond 
which further action in the same direction is made physi- 
cally impossible. 

There is one act to which it is scarcely possible to speak 
of applying purely natural sanctions, while at the same 
time its condemnation has generally been regarded as a 
crucial test of the stringency of moral theories — we mean 
the practical slight upon the natural order of things in- 
volved in the offence of suicide ; an offence which natural 
morality is as well able as any other theory to gratify 
popular feeling by condemning. The popular illustration 
which attempts to discredit suicide by the analogy of a 
soldier deserting his post obviously requires a theological 
background to give it aptness, for if the doctrine of the 
conservation of force is applied, as it presumably may be, 
to thought and sense as well as to unconscious motion, the 
suicide does not defraud the universe of any profit it had 
or might have had out of his being, he simply restores to 
it the force it lent him, which has proved to be inadequate 
to the maintenance of a human life. Suicide is a confes- 



THE NATURAL SANCTIONS OF MORALITY. 253 



sion of defective vitality, abnormal weakness, or excep- 
tional ill-luck, and no man is in a position to say of another 
that he "ought not" to have made away with himself, 
because, when the act is done, it is evident that the im- 
pulse to do it was irresistible, and natural morality does 
not exactly condemn or blame the individual who is merely 
proved to have suffered from extreme natural debility or 
imperfection. But though the man who can do no good 
by living may have a right to die, he should look on his 
own death as the execution of a good-for-nothing unit 
rather than as the excision of a good-for-nothing world 
from a too fastidious consciousness. For those, however, 
who have sufficient strength of will, that is, a sufficiently 
distinct consciousness of vital force in their organisation, 
to last as long as their natural, automatic, bodily life, there 
may be room, when external circumstances are unpropi- 
tious, for strictly moral considerations which forbid suicide 
in the same way as any positive disservice to humanity. 
Desertion is not a crime in a conscript pressed into the 
service of a usurper and called to march, perhaps, against 
his own countrymen ; but as we do not believe the universe 
to be governed by an assailable evil spirit, any more than 
by an adorable good one, we cannot make a duty of insurrec- 
tion, or see any magnanimity in the suicide's futile pro- 
test against things in general. As George Eliot has it : — 

" Noble rebellion lifts a common load ; 
But what is he who flings his own load off 
And leaves his fellows toiling ? " 

Though human existence were a losing battle against 
the ISTot-man, it might still be worth fighting out for 
charity; for those combatants who have fewest illusions 
about an impossible triumph are most at leisure for pos- 
sible precautions against unnecessary disaster, and can do 
something, if they will, to save the discomfiture of the 
doomed host from turning into a disorderly rout, and to 
assure the panic-stricken troops that they will not reach 



234 



NATURAL LAW, 



their last halting-place the sooner, or the later — and which 
were best ? — for treading on each other's heels by the 
way. 

But such statements of the case are morbid and over- 
strained. In point of fact, the natural, realistic way of 
looking at the world and human affairs is as far removed 
from pessimism as from uncritical adoration; and if 
criticism of the universal order is carried beyond a certain 
point, satire becomes as meaningless as panegyric, for in 
an absolutely bad world, if such a thing could be, we 
should not have, what we could no more use than in a 
perfect universe, the ideas of good and evil, or language 
wherewithal to criticise. 

As to the most general of moral duties, the one which 
includes all the rest, the duty of Christian charity — as we 
may still call it, on the principle of rendering to all their 
due, and keeping our diction historical — the natural sanc- 
tion by which this duty is enforced is the impossibility of 
excluding from a consciousness of even ordinary intellec- 
tual and emotional sensibility the knowledge, or rather the 
feeling, of the moral as well as the material effects following 
from causes lying within the determination of the will. 
Habits of united or concerted action have become so in- 
tegral a part of our life that the sympathetic feeling which 
has sprung from them passes now for an essential, primitive 
quality of our nature, and indeed is so essential that an 
entirely consistent egotist might be reckoned as one of the 
" perfect monsters that the world ne'er saw." It is become 
impossible for us to be altogether indifferent to the feelings 
we know to be entertained by those with whom we are in 
relation. What we do or say takes effect, not merely by 
direct action of its own, or by the action which it suggests 
or provokes ; but the effects are such as can be felt by 
some, whose feeling, if it is such as we cannot deliberately 
will to cause, is the efficient motive for forbearing from the 
act. It is not exactly from an overflowing charity that we 
first entangle our life with other lives, and sacrifice a por- 



THE NATURAL SANCTIONS OF MORALITY. 255 

tion of our natural liberty to act alone and unembarrassed ; 
but the moral life of man is, as he labours to make it, 
continuous, and his consciousness, at any given moment, 
Is as much controlled by the historical engagements con- 
tracted by his former self as by his natural disposition or 
acquired moral development. The life that we bor- 
rowed, meaning it to enrich and embellish our own, may 
serve that purpose or not, but it grows into a part of our- 
selves, and cannot be torn off without leaving a moral scar, 
or wounded without causing an entirely personal pain, 
which cannot be got rid of by wishing, even though the 
rise of some fresh personal desire, irreconcilable with older 
ties, may make it natural for a man to wish sometimes, for 
the moment, that no one had any feelings but himself. 

The physical force, as it may be called, of sympathy, is 
not to be confounded either with the moral development 
of sympathetic feeling which makes the good of others as 
much an end as our own good, or with the weight of the 
social sanction properly so called, the naturally selected 
feeling of the mass of men, for or against various actions 
— a feeling which we share more or less completely our- 
selves, but which acts upon us, by the mere force of its 
existence, even when we deliberately defy it. Morality is 
not only the rule which I think good for myself and 
others; it is the. rule which others agree in thinking good 
for me. In the immense majority of cases the feeling of 
the majority is right, and the fear of its disapproval tends 
to enforce a wholesome conformity ; but the inner and the 
outer conscience are independent, so that if the one is 
biassed by partial considerations, the other is ready to 
check its verdict ; and just because they are independent, 
their decision, when they agree, has even more than 
double authority ; each speaks for the other in speaking 
for itself, and when the two voices coincide, it is not in 
virtue of a mere coincidence of opinion, it is because, as a 
matter of fact, the particular and the universal good are 
naturally concordant. The natural good of each individual 



256 



NATURAL LAW. 



is bound up with the good of those of his kind, and thus 
it is that the natural impulse of each individual organism 
to escape, if it can, from the pain of natural imperfection, 
co-operates with the complicated, purely moral and de- 
liberately disinterested tendency of the cultivated con- 
science to find its good in the wellbeing of the whole, 
in the rational co-operation of sympathetic desires and 
resolute, compliant wills, working in conscious harmony 
towards the multiform realisation of natural human per- 
fection. 

Supposing all the good and evil in the actual world to 
be the result of a long natural process of evolution, which 
has become conscious in its latest stages, the conscious- 
ness of such stages is conditioned, not only by the preced- 
ing steps in the process, but also by the various other real 
surviving effects or consequences of them. Moral action 
is therefore in no sense arbitrary or accidental, and the 
practical bearings of a naturalistic theory of morality will 
therefore depend, not upon the nature of the theory, but 
on the way in which, we are led to conclude, the objective 
constitution of the universe compels a reasonable man 
habitually to will. We do not hold a brief for creation, 
and it would sound like an edifying paradox to maintain 
that the natural order of things compels men to the prac- 
tice of all the moral virtues. There is vice as well as 
misery more than enough under the sun ; we only con- 
tend that the quantum of virtue, such as it is, actually 
to be met with upon earth, is not greater than can be 
accounted for by purely natural causes, still in operation 
and perhaps not incapable of by-and-by producing more 
extensive results. The constitution of the universe is the 
cause, the one real antecedent condition of the existence 
of virtue in man, but the motive for any single virtuous 
action is supplied by the virtuous disposition of the man 
who proposes to perform it, not by the fact — or by his 
knowledge of the fact — that his disposition is conditioned 
by the orderly existences around him. Indeed if the 



THE NATURAL SANCTIONS OF MORALITY. 257 

virtuous disposition is incomplete, reflections concerning 
its origin are not by themselves likely to strengthen it, 
for duties towards the universe as a whole are the least 
and weakest of the obligations spontaneously recognised 
by contemporary consciences. 

It is possible that as the intellectual horizon widens 
with "the long result of time," men may become more 
clearly conscious of the most general laws according to 
which they lead their life, and to know the laws of life 
is at least to have learned not to hope for happiness from 
an impossible escape out of their control. But visions of 
the future are veiled in a dim religious light, and for the 
present the only motives that take effect with men, 
women, and children, who « are in doubt whether to do 
as they think right or not, are reflections concerning other 
points of principle or practice, concerning which they are 
not then in doubt at all. All that we call "good" is, 
linked together in man, as the circumstances calling it 
forth are in nature ; and if our theory is sound, it is as 
impossible for any one at a given moment to be a worse 
specimen of his kind than he is, as it is for him at the 
same moment to be a better. But amongst the natural 
sanctions enforcing the necessity of which men are con- 
scious as binding them to the exercise of all the specific 
virtue that is in them, not the least efficacious is the 
natural incapacity under which they labour, of wishing, 
at any given moment, to be worse, of their kind, than 
they actually are. People always wish to remain them- 
selves, even when they wish to do something tending 
certainly to make them worse than they have been. 
They wish to be able to do what they think agreeable 
and wrong as often as their present self wishes, and they 
may be restrained from the vain attempt to gratify that 
wish by the discovery that a given amount of wrong- 
doing will make them unable to refrain, on a future 
occasion, from doing more wrong than they now wish 
to do. 

E 



2 5 8 



NA TURAL LA W. 



Men of the world, who take it on faith from the clergy 
(of all denominations) that religion helps to keep the 
canaille in order, and pious persons, who take it on faith 
from the worldly that the pleasures of vice have a quite 
peculiar zest and intensity, will probably agree in object- 
ing to all the applications we can suggest for a theory of 
natural morality that they are unpractical ; that the theory 
is not disedifying — in theory — but that it will not work ; 
that it may do no harm to the few bloodless philoso- 
phers, worn-out worldlings, and hybrid pedants who may 
incline to adopt it, but that it will be powerless against 
the strong passions and weak brains of the generality of 
mankind. La Eochefoucauld has said it: "Si nous re- 
sistons a nos passions, c'est plus par leur faiblesse que 
par notre force ; " and it may be conceded to the motley 
army of provisional pessimists, who will not easily im- 
prove upon this sarcasm, that the theory we have pro- 
pounded will have no effect upon the mind or morals of 
persons who do not sincerely think it true, while it as 
certainly cannot hope for the fate, which has never yet 
fallen to the lot of a theory, of being thought true by 
everybody. Criticism on this point, to be really damag- 
ing, would have to establish that the practical inferences 
which we have drawn from the theory would not follow 
from it, if it can be rationally held. 

By a curious reversal of the Utilitarian mistake, religious 
moralists seem to assume that happiness is to be found 
in this world if we only have the courage to be wicked 
enough : were this indeed so, with the strongest desire to 
think well of human nature — should we not all turn wicked 
to-morrow ? But those who lay most stress on -the as- 
sumption have so evidently never tried the experiment 
they speak of, that to them, at any rate, it is clearly 
natural to be good. If the world were exactly as we 
may suppose Saint Anthony believed it to be, if theft, 
murder, adultery, and evil - speaking were the natural 
pleasures of the human race, if our best joys came through 



THE NATURAL SANCTIONS OF MORALITY. 259 



the senses, without any reference to our knowledge of 
their causes or the effects of their indulgence, morality 
would be impossible instead of hard, unnatural instead of 
necessary ; but the balance of inducement leans really to 
the other side, though not so overwhelmingly as to pre- 
clude the possibility of misleading oscillations. There is 
no prince of darkness baiting cunning snares for our souls, 
and the charm of forbidden fruit disappears when we see 
beyond the prohibition to the reasons which dictated it. 
The clown whose happiest moments are when he is a 
quarter drunk, may wish to spend his life in drinking. A 
youth of untaught mind and untrained character, turned 
loose upon the Quartier Latin of a metropolis, may go 
to the dogs in all innocence and good faith, believing 
with the fervour of inexperience in absinthe, dice, and 
courtesans, and the irreconcilability of marriage or pro- 
fessional industry with the higher life of the genialisch 
soul. But the educated naturalist, with whose morality 
we are concerned, must be supposed to have got beyond 
such naive illusions as these. Eegard for his health and 
his purse will keep him sober and moderately decorous in 
life, as regard for his neck and his personal liberty will 
prevent his murdering or stealing, the latter, indeed, as 
Clough observes — 

" An empty feat 
When 'tis so lucrative to cheat." 

Without running such risks, it is open to him to lie and 
swindle, to hate his neighbour and love his neighbour's; 
wife, to thrive upon the follies, the vices, the sufferings of 
his fellow-men, to trade upon their superstitions, to draw 
his profit from their virtues. It is in his power to indulge 
his appetites as long as he has any, to neglect his duties 
till he has forgotten they existed, to check his sympathies 
till they cease to interfere with his most mischievous plea- 
sures. Neither God nor man can hinder : we have assumed 
that there is no God to punish, and as to the opinion of 



26c 



NATURAL LAW. 



his equals, if such a plan of life as this really seems the 
most eligible to one sane man, who has studied the order 
of the world and learned to view its facts in their true 
proportions, doubtless the others, being of like passions 
with himself, will in their secret hearts think him a clever 
fellow for leading it successfully. If such a prospect does 
not attract us — and candidly, does it ? — the reason must be 
that this also is vanity and vexation of spirit; that the 
pleasures of vice, like those of virtue, are an agreed-upon 
fiction. 

The chief advantage to practical morality from the 
abandonment of the theistic hypothesis would consist in 
the economy of moral force effected by substituting in all 
cases the main purpose and immediate consequence pro- 
posed for the side-issues and indirect motives, with their 
attendants, the widening waste and misunderstanding pro- 
duced by over-symbolical reasoning. The amount of force 
in the world at a given moment is the same, whatever may 
be thought about its origin or the possible effects to be 
produced by it ; but the direction given to the force de- 
termines its real productive efficacy. As motion can pass 
into heat and back again into so much mechanical work, 
conscious force may be suspended or arrested as passion or 
pain, and when liberated, discharge itself in fresh intel- 
lectual or moral action. Theistical morality regards the 
real world as of secondary importance to the relations be- 
tween the individual and an unknowable spiritual power ; 
and it is only the fragments of energy remaining, after 
all the best strength of the individual nature has been 
expended in an intensity of religious emotion, that is avail- 
able for purely human ends and interests. It is a remark- 
able evidence of the general solidarity of existence and 
the substantial justice of the popular conceptions respect- 
ing the tendencies of the moral influence of the Not-self, 
that an extraneous motive, regard for an ideal third power 
outside man and nature, should so often and generally have 
acted as the natural, direct, and present motive of regard 



THE NATURAL SANCTIONS OF MORALITY. 261 

for the beings to be affected by our action would do ; but 
the parallelism may be accidentally disturbed, and then, 
in place of the innocently circuitous argument of Jonathan 
Edwards — that since men cannot reward the Deity for his 
virtues, they should do good to their " indigent brethren " 
for his sake — people may learn to burn, or at least con- 
scientiously to dislike each other, still for the love of God. 
If, as will probably be admitted, it would conduce to the 
natural good of society for men's sympathy with each 
other's pains and pleasures, and their readiness to relieve 
or promote the same, to be more lively and active than is 
the case, it is evidently a misfortune to risk the loss of 
such help or sympathy as may be had, by conducting 
it to its natural object along an unnecessarily winding 
channel. 

Another way in which theism is unfavourable to 
morality, or at least less favourable than simple realism, 
is that it diminishes the sense of responsibility which 
accompanies actions performed in accordance with fully 
intelligible laws. Men with a finer sense of natural justice 
than the ancient Hebrews, believe in a God too just to visit 
the sins of the fathers upon the children, too just not, 
sooner or later, somehow or other, to right whatever moral 
wrongs men in ignorance or wilfulness may have done to 
one another. In this way the most powerful of all the 
natural sanctions of morality, the knowledge of the in- 
evitable sequence of effects and causes, is robbed of half 
its proper influence on the imagination. Many men who 
would not scruple to sin against themselves or a Creator, 
would hesitate to sin irreparably against a fellow-mortal, 
if they did not half believe in a power Not-theniselves, able 
and willing to undo the natural effects of their work: To 
understand that the will of every man is a moral power, 
second to nothing except the united or compounded will of 
many men, does not make men less, but rather more dis- 
posed to value the type of human perfection which they 
have no choice but to conceive as the supreme good ; and 



262 



NATURAL LAW. 



to understand that, if they wish this type to he realised, 
they must realise it themselves, does not make them less, 
hut rather more disposed than "before to take the practical 
action which they suppose to he favourable to their desire. 
If we want anything done, do not like doing it, and are 
quite assured that if we do not do it ourselves, no one else 
can or will do it for us, to say in pique at this ungenerous 
behaviour of nature — It shall go undone — is perfectly 
possible, but nature has the last word in the quarrel, 
whether the object we had in view was happiness or virtue. 
We may take or leave the small quantum of pleasure 
offered to us by the natural order, but if we take it, we 
take it on the prescribed terms, if we leave it, it is at the 
price of our own natural loss. Similarly if the desired 
end of undesirably difficult attainment is moral, i.e., such 
as the judgment finds it impossible not to approve, the 
approbation is not affected by the difficulty, and continues 
to be a motive in its despite. A person of ordinary moral 
sensibility would feel it to be unjust to visit the cross- 
grained arrangements of creation upon an otherwise deserv- 
ing object, already, probably, a victim to some severe natural 
ordinance; and it is scarcely conceivable that a person 
bent on doing a good action from the disinterested love of 
good, should be deterred from doing it by the discovery 
that he will have no supernatural assistance in the process. 
It may be a misfortune to mankind that there are no gods, 
but the weak, wicked, and ignorant of the present genera- 
tion, who are the natural objects of humane solicitude, are 
obviously not to blame for a misfortune which, it may be 
thought, falls most severely on themselves. Certainly it 
does not prove that there are gods, that the maxim, "Every 
man for himself, and God for us all," may prove extremely 
comfortable to those who do not doubt their own ability 
to take care of themselves without divine assistance, and 
feel at liberty to exercise their natural powers of self- 
protection the less scrupulously and considerately for 
supposing such assistance to be at the service of then* 



THE NATURAL SANCTIONS OF MORALITY. 263 

weaker brethren, who — to translate the secret thoughts of 
some robust liberals — are such fools as to want it. 

In ascribing an empirical relational necessity to morality, 
instead of a transcendental force or fitness of which the 
working cannot be followed either by sense or reason, we 
certainly do not weaken the practical efficacy of its pre- 
cepts. If there is a specific type or standard of human 
excellence, varying almost imperceptibly, and not seeming 
to the members of the species in whom the tendency to 
approximate to the type is conscious, to vary for the 
worse, the natural tendency towards such approximation, 
which exists more or less strongly in every sane human 
being, exists equally whether we suppose a power to exist 
outside consciousness that approves of the subjects of the 
strongest tendency or not. To follow the tendency in 
order to secure this approbation is a course that would 
occur to no one who had not previously discovered, or 
imagined, points of intellectual agreement and moral 
sympathy with the power by whom it is supposed to be 
bestowed ; such a sense of harmony between the individual 
and the Not-self regarded as a legislator is religious, and a 
sincere and enlightened religious faith enforces the moral 
instincts by sanctions which are undoubtedly binding upon 
the few with whom religious faith is a reality. But these 
sanctions, which are efficient, though not universal in 
their operation, are immaterial, emotional, and subjective. 
Eeligion generalises the tendencies of the universal order, 
and represents them collectively as binding upon those 
who acquiesce in their isolated reality, in the same way 
that morality generalises the impulses of the individual, 
and represents his habitual disposition or will as a force 
controlling partial and ephemeral inclinations. And as, 
out of all the real tendencies of the universe, there is no 
one more constantly influential on human life than the 
self-assertion of human nature which we call morality, 
none is more influential in determining the religious 
generalisation, which, being wider than the moral gen- 



264 



NATURAL LAW. 



eralisation, seems to include, and even in a measure to 
explain it, by standing between it and the irrational 
finality of an ultimate fact. 

It is a remnant of superstitious optimism to assume 
that if morality is natural, moral imperfection must be 
impossible, and the objection that our theory takes no 
account of the moral struggles of a divided will, cannot 
on reflection be maintained. The fact that a person may 
know and believe that an act is certainly right, and yet 
not do it, proves nothing for or against one system of 
morality rather than another. We do not maintain that 
any man, much less that all men, are absolutely perfect 
after their kind ; kinds are always making, never made, 
and the consensus of all the powers of the soul which 
makes knowledge or belief practically effective, is rare and 
seldom complete. Were it otherwise, the consciousness 
of voluntary effort in men towards the realisation of their 
own perfection, and the perfecting of all the other modifi- 
able elements of the natural world after their kind, in 
which we have seen morality to consist, would not need 
the stimulus of religion, or of any other natural sanction, 
to give it persistence. But when moral action has been 
made difficult in proportion to the strength of the ten- 
dency towards perfection of which the individual is con- 
scious, or when the consciousness of the real tendency is 
imperfectly articulate, the secondary representative influ- 
ence of the natural sanction is neither superfluous nor 
ineffectual. The immediate motive for the performance of 
any virtuous action is the judgment of the individual that 
the act is good and ought to be done : the sanction by 
which the doing of it is enforced is the knowledge of the 
natural effects of the omission ; the consciousness that every 
single failure to act as human justice and charity demand 
is irremediable in time or eternity ; that by the act which 
we call wrong, we contribute in our measure to make the 
world other than, seriously and deliberately, we would 
have it to be — to mar creation out of wantonness and im- 



THE NATURAL SANCTIONS OF MORALITY. 265 



becility. This is the most general form of moral necessity. 
The world suffers — is the worse — for every laches of every 
individual, for every sin of omission and commission, in the 
present ill, in the chance of unforeseeable consequences, and 
in the future deterioration of the sinner. Of course there 
are degrees, but this is the sufficient reason and real ex- 
planation of the general rule that the best possible ought 
always to be done ; and while we tax any other moral stan- 
dard than this with incompleteness, it cannot be said that 
this is itself preternaturally high. We recognise no im- 
possible ought, and the duty of each individual is really 
limited by his powers — as well as coextensive with them. 
No one has done his duty who has done less than he 
could, i.e., produced less than the good effect which his 
particular gifts conscientiously employed to the best 
advantage might have wrought. The responsibility of the 
man as a whole is coextensive with his consciousness of 
definite powers, and duties of imperfect obligation are only 
so styled in reference to an imperfect susceptibility to the 
force of a real claim. If from constitutional feebleness 
these powers are not exerted, we call the man, not indeed 
wicked, but weak, distinguishing, among various forms of 
imperfection, simple defect of energy from its pernicious 
malapplication. 

Eemorse or repentance, the state of consciousness which 
follows action done in opposition to the sense of duty or 
moral obligation — is the pain of discovering that an act 
done with a divided will remains and binds our future 
life ; to have done wrong is to have bound ourselves by 
a will that was not truly our own, and not ourselves only, 
but all those who may become sensible of the conse- 
quences of our action. Devout theologians have questioned 
whether it was within the power of God himself to cause 
that what was should not have been ; certainly man has 
no such power, and by his knowledge of this fact, his will 
is bound to justice and consistency. The will is seldom 
or never directly self-contradictory, and the explanation 



266 



NATURAL LAW. 



of most wrong-doing is only that people fail to imagine all 
the consequences of what they do, and reject or resist the 
indirect results of what they would otherwise have willed. 
But there are two offences which the canons of natural 
morality might pronounce to he unpardonable, if it were 
possible for them to be committed with a clear and ade- 
quate apprehension of their tendency — the direct inflic- 
tion of unprofitable pain, and the forcing a fellow-mortal 
into crime — the ranking oneself among the brute obstacles 
to the natural efforts of a human soul towards its own 
proper perfection. To do less than the good we physically 
might ourselves is imperfection, the other is sin; for 
though of course it may be said that the root of all, even 
the deadliest evil, is only imperfection, yet in the present 
state of our moral ideas, the duty of being perfect our- 
selves is generally felt to be of imperfect obligation ; on 
the other hand, deliberately to interfere with the possible 
perfection of another, is felt by every one in the court of 
conscience to be wrong, and what every one agrees in feel- 
ing as well as thinking to be wrong, may as well be called 
sin for distinction, since the word is in our language and 
practices answering to it in our lives. Indeed we should 
have little faith in the power of any religion which should 
banish from its liturgy the cry thrown up in all ages from 
the depths of human hearts for " mercy upon us, miserable 
sinners ! " Side by side with an irrepressible aspiration 
after the perfect good which we shall never see, or know, 
or possess, there is also an ineffaceable conviction that 
our life is nothing worth except in so far as it grants us 
glimpses of the unattainable divine; and because these 
glimpses are so few and dim, we cry out upon ourselves 
for miserable sinners, perishing for need of mercy and 
spiritual help. But for most sinners there is a place of 
repentance, if they seek it carefully and with tears : the 
unpardonable sin is to know what is permanently good 
and to say deliberately : " I can get more pleasure for 
myself by other conduct than the right — I can overreach 



THE NATURAL SANCTIONS OF MORALITY, 267 

creation ; I and my desires can get the better of the natural 
law of virtue, of the rule that is good for all ; I will sin and 
some one else may suffer." There is, we say it advisedly, 
no power in nature to prevent this calculation being some- 
times made and acted on with impunity. The ungodly do 
flourish, even to their death full of years and honours — 
not always, but quite often enough to make Utilitarians of 
little faith ask themselves in alarm, Where is now their 
god ? and truly their god is nowhere, but the spirit of 
goodness is in the souls of men teaching them to despise 
the wages of iniquity. These men are rebels, successful 
thieves and usurpers, but not for that do theft and dis- 
loyalty become the law of life ; these men are the enemies 
of each generation, and the end to which our labours point 
is such an adjustment of social sanctions as shall strengthen 
the hands of natural justice, and bring the ungodly even 
to temporal judgment. 

The Christian doctrine of the remission of sins is an 
attempt to' disguise what a growing acuteness of moral 
sensibility caused to be felt as intolerable — the appalling 
stringency of the natural sanctions of morality : a morality 
based upon religion is always liable to relapse into anti- 
nomian quietism, for it is felt that the supreme being can- 
not be injured by our frailty ; and though a genuine regard 
for the powers of the Not-self is normally associated with 
at least average strength of moral purpose or virtue, there 
are no natural sanctions confirming or perpetuating merely 
emotional states, and it is easier to weak, impressionable 
characters to profess a general submission to they do not 
clearly know what, than to co-ordinate their impressions and 
harmonise them with a course of energetic action. If the 
practical sense of moral obligation is superseded by devo- 
tional sentiments recognising no worse sin than their own 
cessation, repentance is limited to ideal, so to speak con- 
ventional wrongs, which may be excused at the option of 
the person offended, but — by the hypothesis — not substan- 
tially injured by them. But there is no such way of escape 



268 



NATURAL LAW. 



from the consciousness of real material wrong done to living 
sentient beings; Gods or men may forgive the sinner if 
they please, and men at least, we argue, have no call to 
resent each other's imperfections ; but of what avail is it 
that others should acquiesce with religious resignation in 
an act in which we cannot and will not acquiesce our- 
selves ? Those who believe in an external tribunal com- 
petent to call the guilty to account for what they have 
done, thought, or neglected, may think it pertinent to plead 
in excuse or justification that they did not know, or did not 
mean, or could not help what they have done ; but of what 
avail is any formal justification in the face of a real regret 
that we could not help, that we did not know, that we have 
done what we did not mean ? What consolation is it to 
us to consider that the universe is neither angry nor vin- 
dictive, if the act done with the will that was not truly 
ours lives and glares at us in the consequences that we 
hate ? Prayers and penances may distract attention from 
the lamentable reality, we may forget our own natural, 
righteous self-reproach by dreaming of imaginary conse- 
quences for which imaginary remedies are real enough, but 
there is only one true remedy for human error, a remedy 
that cannot be applied from without — to undo the evil deed 
and bury its memory by the acts of an atoning energy ; and 
here we may observe the restorative powers of nature, or 
rather the simple fact that not all imperfection is mortal, 
and that the natural tendencies of real beings, though they 
may be arrested or impeded, are still the source or mani- 
festation of whatever good or perfection is attainable in 
nature. For an intense regret, like any other strong emo- 
tion, is a potential force, painful while suspended as pas- 
sion, but convertible into active energy, and then serving 
to heighten and animate the natural faculties, so that the 
sinner that repenteth may so much more than undo his 
original ill- work as to give the world more occasion for joy 
than ninety-nine just persons who need no repentance. 
But the evil is evil all the same, and though it is well 



THE NATURAL SANCTIONS OF MORALITY. 269 

for sin to be atoned for, it is better for it not to be com- 
mitted ; no unimaginable eventualities hatching under the 
brooding wings of the Unknowable can turn its commission 
into a good in disguise. 

There are no natural sanctions that can permanently and 
habitually affect, in favour of morality, the will of beings 
with no moral impulses or sensibilities. If there are men 
without a conscience, or with a conscience that allows them 
habitually and contentedly to act in a manner called immoral 
by general consent, they form a type of being that it is 
perhaps a mistake to call imperfect, or morally bad, for it 
may be perfect after its kind — a kind materially mis- 
chievous, like rattlesnakes, cancers, or volcanoes, bad in 
relation to the rest of the world. We may look upon it as 
a fresh proof of the imperfection of the universe that it 
includes some kinds of beings the existence of which is 
naturally injurious to the perfection of other kinds, but 
sound morality and rational religion alike protest against 
the admixture of any personal animosity with our appre- 
hension of the nature of things. With the spread of intel- 
ligence, for which tolerance is another name, it becomes 
possible to controvert an opinion or to resist a policy with- 
out arrogating to ourselves the right of passing exactly 
moral condemnation on its supporters. If they act, as we 
think, wrongly, their mistake may be pitiable as well as 
mischievous, for they may perhaps discover, and, as w T e 
have seen, regret it ; while if they are acting against their 
conscience, against the tendencies of a nature that is the 
same as ours, they are still more certainly to be pitied, 
since failure or success must be alike uneasy to them. 

If there is no prospect of the wrongs of earth being 
righted in heaven, the secular judgment, which really, of 
the two, prefers the right, becomes convinced of the idle- 
ness of procrastination, and compelled by the irresistible 
pressure of natural facts to efforts of rational beneficence. 
Human carelessness, not divine providence or infernal 
craft, is to blame for half the evils that surround us, and 



f 



270 NATURAL LAW. 

since it is evident that no miracles will be wrought for our 
deliverance, we must either bow our necks to the yoke or 
use what natural means of throwing off the same are 
offered to us by the unconscious, unimpassioned order of 
the world. But, in any case, it is impossible to trace a 
logical connection between the abandonment of erroneous 
theological or religious opinions and the adoption of anti- 
social principles of morality. The negative opinion known 
as atheism is not a chief, much less the only article of faith 
with modern rationalists, realists, positivists, naturalists, 
or however else they may finally agree to call themselves. 
Atheism is not a creed, only a passing protest against those 
portions of existing creeds which consist in affirming the 
existence either of arbitrary and naturally incalculable 
influences acting upon the minds or bodies of men, or of a 
tract of human knowledge and experience winch is natu- 
rally and permanently confused and disconnected from our 
ordinary perceptions of fact and relation. The reasons for 
this protest are not all self-evident, and accordingly, " 11 est 
pas athee qui veut :" a little science may convert men from 
Christianity to " spiritualism," or to the dogmas of agnos- 
ticism, or to an undogmatic reliance on the existence some- 
where of mysteries explanatory of the essences of things ; 
but this is only the substitution of one confused belief for 
another, and certainly does nothing to make morality more 
intelligible, rational, and consistent. But men who wish 
to disbelieve in the existence of a Personal, more or less 
righteous Deity, because they imagine that such an exist- 
ence is the only obstacle to their finding happiness in un- 
principled self-indulgence, have not even taken the first 
step towards embracing the doctrines of scientific atheism ; 
they conceive the Not-self as a fetish, and the self as 
another, and if they were to develop their conceptions, 
would be more likely to arrive at some form or other of 
theistic superstition than at the recognition of the universe 
as a system of phenomena bound together by laws, or 
existing in constant intersecting relations. 



THE NATURAL SANCTIONS OF MORALITY. 271 

The connection which we observe to be constant between 
certain causes and effects is not a sign of any animus in 
the connected phenomena either severally or collectively ; 
the moral action of natural influences upon moral agents 
demands consciousness in the subject of the influence, but 
by no means necessarily in its source, and the sanctions 
by which the voluntary submission of men to the influ- 
ences of which they are conscious is enforced, do not take 
the form of rewards or punishments, bestowed or inflicted 
by some third Essence, distinct alike from the conscious 
agent and the medium or conditions of his activity. There 
is no watchful Providence or natural equity at work to 
apportion human success to desert, to make the pleasur- 
ableness of normal action proportionate to the moral effort 
expended in its execution, and the crowd of disconnected 
antecedents to any single composite state or volition is too 
great for all their results to be spontaneously harmonious. 
Merely to do habitually what is right is not enough to 
secure habitual happiness, and we think, as long as we 
think confusedly, that it is immoral of nature to insist, 
for instance, on our being prudent and far-sighted, and of 
sound bodily organisation, as well as honestly good-inten- 
tioned, if we wish to enjoy more than the minimum of 
natural pleasure which attends the consciousness of normal 
action. The reward of a virtuous action is its successful 
efficiency, as the reward of self-indulgence is pleasurable 
passion of uncertain duration and intensity. The reward 
of virtue is not happiness, though the happiness of the 
virtuous man lies in virtue as the happiness of the profli- 
gate in vice. To ordinary men, in so far as they are vir- 
tuous, happiness lies in following their disinterested 
impulses towards good ; in so far as they are vicious, in 
indulging propensities which do not conduce to the greatest 
happiness or the greatest perfection of mankind. 

The choice of Herakles may be a choice of evils; the 
way of transgressors is hard, and the paths of virtue lead 
less surely to pleasantness than p^ace : but for ages the 



272 



NATURAL LAW. 



common sense of mankind has been agreed as to how the 
son of Zeus will choose. The problem is still the same, 
though reduced to the unheroic proportions of modern daily 
life, and we find small men and women choosing, equally 
with the hero, virtues on a scale with their strength and 
their temptations. The old serpent of Eternity, Time, has 
kept the promise of that other mythological snake, and 
man, as a god, knowing good and evil, chooses the good at 
his will. 



\ 



VII. 

SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL 
PERFECTION. 



"Er verhehlte uns nicht, wie er jenen liberalen "Wahlspruch : 'Den mei- 
sten das Beste ! ' nach seiner Art verwandelt und ' vielen das Erwunschte ' 
zugedacht. Die meisten lassen sich nicht finden noch kennen, was das 
Beste sei, noch weniger auszumitteln. Yiele jedoch sind immer nm uns 
her ; was sie wiinschen, erfahren wir, was sie wunschen, sollten iiberlegen 
wir ; und so lasst sich immer Bedeutendes thun und schaffen." — Goethe. 

"Le bon cote de la nature humaine etant evidemment lc seul qui puisse 
permettre des associations de quelque etenduietde quelque duree." — Comte. 

"How were Friendship possible? In mutual devotedness to the Good 
and True : otherwise impossible ; except as Armed Neutrality, or hollcw 
Commercial League. A man, be the Heavens ever praised, is sufficient for 
himself ; yet were ten men, united in Love, capable of being and of doing 
what ten thousand singly would fail in. Infinite is the help man can yield 
to man ! "— Carlyle. 

"Look straight to this, to what nature leads thee, both the universal 
nature through the things which happen to thee, and thy own nature 
through the acts which must be done by thee."— Marcus Aurelius. 



S 



The best possible attainment, at any given period, a question of fact — Various 
types of specific excellence only comparable when tried by the standard 
of social serviceableness — Mutual dependence of the ruling few and the 
subservient many — Alternative vocations : Politics, Industrialism, Art, 
Science, Philanthropy— Political ideals : postulates ; that progress is 
normal and privilege unjust : definition of social progress — Danger of 
social disorganisation comes not from the fact of social development, but 
from its partial and unequal extent — Popular and providential theories 
of the function of government — Differentiation of social functions ; self- 
willed service honourable and compulsory obedience base — Natural 
ability privileged to render the most honourable services — But beneficial 
services must be accepted as well as proffered, and so far the leaders of 
society are at the mercy of their followers — Growing complexity of the 
social ideal which makes the obligations of individuals less clear and 
notorious — The ideal in legislation neither more nor less attainable than 
the ideal in government — Legal rights of property subject to the common 
interest— Effect on proprietary rights of an absolute physical limitation 
of supply in the case of any commodity in demand: e.g., land — The 
waiving of anti-social rights a step towards the formation of improved 
social custom which may in time rank as law — Organisation of public 
services — Theory of the production and distribution of wealth —Natural 
versus competitive value : cost and utility the essential elements — Third 
element in the price of labour : the Wille zum Leben of the vendor — 
Personal motives not always forthcoming to urge every one to the end 
generally most desirable — Inexpedient to interfere with the accidental 
consequences of unequal natural ability — Desirable to substitute a 
rational estimate of value for the fluctuating competitive price — Par- 
tition of the "unearned increment" of social wealth — Natural value not 
diminished by increased production, nor real purchasing power — Honorary 
services the natural price of unearned wealth — The ideal state on all 
points practically unattainable— Query, whether the best possible be an 
approach to the unattainable — Demand that ethical theories shall carry 
with them their application to the practical emergencies which concern 
us — The duty of individuals traced out by the social and the personal 
ideal conjointly — Temporary reluctant and conditional exaltation of the 
philanthropic reformer — ^Esthetic emotion— Positive truth— Moral dif- 
fidence of a critical introspective age — The asceticism of secular fastidi- 
ousness — No real antagonism possible between the claims of social duty 
and individual perfection — Specialisation of function among individuals 
usually a gain, but increasing differentiation of classes a loss, if it ex- 
tends beyond an external division of labour to a radical contrast of 
nature— Personal completeness a condition of the best action however 
highly specialised. 



VII. 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 

The natural, necessary, and real standard of moral good 
has been described as consisting in the greatest possible 
perfection of individuals and society. While we give 
our statements a degree of generality that allows them to 
apply with equal truth to all times and places, we also 
condemn ourselves to a rather empty formal accuracy. 
For the question that interests the minds and passions of 
every age is a practical one : What is the greatest perfec- 
tion possible to this present generation of ours, and by 
what means may we attain it ? And in answering this 
question we have no longer to depend on reasoning, but on 
direct insight or appreciation at once of the powers and the 
desires actually and potentially dominant in contemporary 
society, for these are the factors of the sought-for result ; 
and an abstract formula of perfection rather chills than 
encourages the healthy working of enthusiasm for present 
possibilities by the calm impartiality with which it surveys 
possibilities in general and allows the praise of moral 
excellence to the realisation of all alike. 

And yet we also have our own special ideal, and a quite 
special ambition to make our ideal the most complete and 
attractive among its kind, as well as a special sensitiveness 
to the chance of inadequacy in our conception and failure 
in our attempt, which seems great in proportion to the 
growing height and breadth — I will not say of our ideal — 
but of our conception of what an ideal ought to be. He, 
indeed, would be a bold man who should attempt to trace 



276 



NATURAL LAW. 



for us all the sublime ideal possibly to be attained by the 
sum of personal aspirations, duly harmonised and disci- 
plined in practical co-operation; an ideal in which all 
men's best should be included, while yet then zeal re- 
mained uncrushed by the discovery that this best was not 
the absolute good, because — best as our good is to us — it 
will become better still when seen with its light shining 
undimmed in the full blaze of universal perfection, a per- 
fect part of a perfect whole. 

And scarcely less hopeless would be the attempt to 
catalogue all the special ideals lawfully and naturally 
cherished by men and women of varied gifts and ante- 
cedents. The votary of one ideal can hardly do justice to 
his neighbour's worship, and the eclectic, whose own ideal 
is to do justice to that of every one else, is somehow 
a degree further from the spontaneous sympathies of a 
pure fanatic, than another fanatic, whose range of vision 
offers no arrogant appearance of superior breadth. Still, a 
beginning must be made, and while the ideal sages and 
inspired prophets of the future still linger in the womb of 
time, we blunder on after a statement, a hair's-breadth 
truer, fuller, juster, more livingly sympathetic than we 
have yet attained, of what is common in all idealism, and 
of the relation of each man's good to the universal per- 
fection, the complete edifice of good which is the ideal Best. 

The problem is necessarily two-fold. We ask ourselves 
not only what is the best life possible for this or that man, 
with such and such passions and capabilities, but also 
which lives is it best for society to see multiplied, or what 
is the best proportion for the divers elements that do and 
must co-exist to bear to each other ? How much of each 
ideal may modest men dream of making their own, and 
what considerations may have weight with them at the 
period which comes to many, when an aim and an ideal 
have to be chosen with more or less conscious determination, 
or the doom of aimlessness deliberately accepted? We 
say that individual perfection consists in the union of the 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 



277 



greatest possible number and variety of energies and suscep- 
tibilities, all reconcilable with, or conducive to, the objective 
good of other human agents and patients. To be a perfect 
instrument and to work perfectly is the sum of the best 
possible human achievement ; but so broad a statement is 
insignificant unless we have a distinct image of the various 
functions which men have the choice of discharging, and 
the various qualifications which extend or limit their range 
of choice. 

The great mass of mankind live, and perhaps always 
will live, mainly by routine, occupied by the tastes, solaced 
by the pleasures provided ready-made by their circum- 
stances; for them, therefore, the social question includes 
the personal, and their best development is conditional on 
the ideal organisation of the community to which they 
belong. They follow uncritically (but not, therefore, with- 
out some moral sense of faithfulness to their surroundings) 
one or other of the more or less mechanical industries 
which produce together what we call our civilisation ; and 
it is for their sakes, and mainly by the help of their native 
docility, or leadableness, that substantial social progress 
appears at once as supremely desirable and even possible. 
There can be nothing — good or bad — in the whole except 
what is in the parts, and we cannot alter the essential 
nature of any element of society by direct action or per- 
suasion ; but an infinitesimal improvement in the mass of 
men, too slight to be of much account as an end for indi- 
viduals, will, if common enough, amount to an appreciable 
change in the medium of life for individuals, which in- 
voluntarily and unconsciously modifies the whole future 
of every unit in the mass, by making a better average of 
existence easy and possible for all, including the minority 
whose choice and resolves are more consciously deliberate, 
if not more really independent of determining conditions. 

The uncle in Goethe's JBelcenntnisse einer schd?ien Seele 
expresses the conclusions of human morality when he says 
that man's chief merit is to determine his circumstances as 



278 



NATURAL LAW. 



much as he can, and to be determined by them as little as 
he can ; that the world lies before us as a quarry before 
the architect, out of which we have to carve our own ideal 
self, and that it rests with ourselves whether the resulting 
edifice be a fine work of art or a helpless failure. But 
though it is certainly a weakness to be at the mercy of 
every accidental motive and external impression as it 
arises, though morality may consist mainly in the reaction 
of the character against the dominion of isolated events 
that interfere with its normal development, if that which 
is now the normal development and proper nature of the 
character has previously been determined or conditioned 
by the collective action of forces in the Not-self, it can 
scarcely be regarded as a weakness, it may even be the 
truest strength to allow the nature and the conduct toge- 
ther to be determined, not indeed by chance collisions with 
fragments of the Not-self, but by the sum of its coherent, 
harmonious influences. Still, if the best action of the natural 
forces of the universe on the self depends on the nature of 
the self, there cannot be one and the same universal ideal 
for all the world, without reference to their special natural 
aptitudes ; and it is not strictly speaking reasonable to 
express anything resembling a moral preference for one 
kind of nature over another, except so far as one kind is 
supposed to be more useful, or to contribute more to the na- 
tural good of the species than another. Questions respect- 
ing the comparative dignity or excellence of the active and 
the speculative life, for instance, or of the industry of the 
artist, the student, or the merchant, are altogether idle for 
want of a common measure by which they could be gauged. 
There may be shopkeepers, artisans, or maid-servants 
more nearly perfect of their respective kinds than any 
contemporary poet or statesman, and it is a vain conceit to 
say that one variety of human kind is intrinsically better 
than another, except in reference to a common (social) 
standard. 

A strong bias in favour of one class of actions or another 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 279 



gives little presumption in favour of the wisdom or good- 
ness of acts determined by the bias ; but some bias is a con- 
dition of natural force and efficiency, since without it the 
will must remain the tool or plaything of circumstances. 
A disinterested preference or admiration may be felt for 
human beings in whom all the most important and charac- 
teristic of human faculties, intellect, imagination, energy, 
and benevolence, are developed in the highest perfection 
and most just proportions , but this natural appreciation 
of specific excellence does not take the form of moral 
praise or admiration so long as the faculties in question are 
misapplied, or — which is seldom altogether the case — ap- 
plied in merely self-contained, self-regarding accomplish- 
ment. To praise great men for the help they give humanity 
to be its best self — both by the direct addition of so much 
human faculty and by the assistance its exercise affords to 
the development of other organisms — is as reasonable as 
any other natural tendency, for humanity cannot well fail 
to think its own best good. As Dr. Newman remarks in 
speaking of the intellect as a moral influence : " Indivi- 
duals will occur to all of us who deservedly attract our 
love and admiration, and whom the world almost worships 
as the work of its hands. Eeligious principle, indeed — 
that is faith — is to all appearance simply away ; the work 
is as certainly not supernatural as it is certainly noble and 
beautiful." And we fail altogether to appreciate the criti- 
cism that such words as noble and beautiful have no mean- 
ing when used in an exclusively natural sense in connection 
with the characters or actions of men. With the utmost 
desire for impartiality we cannot promise to sever the na- 
tural associations of those words from their appropriate use ; 
nature, not the faint trace of half-forgotten religious pre- 
judices, is to blame if we can never quite get rid of the 
notion that we are praising a thing when we call it good. 

We cannot draw a hard and fast line between the nature 
of the many and that of the few, but the aristocracy of 
nature distinguishes itself mainly by the proportion of self- 



2C0 



NATURAL LAW. 



originating. seK-determimiig power possessed by its mem- 
bers. The social action of this aristocracy is dependent on 
the power and will of the masses to he led this way or 
that, hut their individual development is in their own 
hands just in so far as they can turn their surroundings 
into its instrument ; while the social ideal, which must be 
the same for all, depends for its wealth upon the free ini- 
tiative of those who have received — as an unexplained 
natural inheritance — the power of giving more than they 
receive in the course of their natural life. These aristocrats 
differ from their humbler fellows in degree only, not in kind, 
and the comparative strength of personal and altruistic 
impulses and feelings is much the same among them as 
among the masses, so that from this point of view again 
we do not find moral inequalities always corresponding to 
the inequality of natural power. 

Xow, if we attempt to classify the courses open to these 
weightier personalities, each of whom is, in a manner, re- 
presentative of the tendencies of a sequent class, we find 
some pursuits primarily consisting in the action of the 
self upon other men, some in action which is primarily 
self-regarding, and even so far as in relation with the 
outer world, not mainly in relation with its human 
denizens ; while among actions or pursuits that are ob- 
jectively altruistic, there is still the distinction be:~rf:i 
classes of motives, or the purpose, personal or disin- 
terested, of the altruistic course. 

Practically the ambitions of educated intelligence take 
one or other of the lines which we indicate vaguely by 
the words, Politics. Industrialism, Art, Science, Philan- 
thropy, Self-culture. Men aspire to rule the many, some- 
times for the pleasure of ruling, sometimes for the benefit 
of the ruled : they seek to produce, to multiply articles 
of material utility or luxury, sometimes merely to gratify 
the impulse of production, sometimes for the sake of 
material reward, more rarely with the intention of minis- 
tering to the material wants or convenience of the com- 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION 281 

munity ; men devote themselves to art, the worship and 
creation of the beautiful, partly from inward impulse, 
partly for the delight of the worship, partly from a dis- 
interested, almost religious reverence for those mysterious 
qualities whereby the sounds and sights of nature stir the 
feelings of men—a piety not the less real because wholly 
free from arriere pensee, an involuntary, uncalculating, and 
most profound sympathy between man and the natural 
harmonies of the world to which he owes his birth. Men 
devote themselves, again, to the acquisition of knowledge 
and the discovery of natural facts, partly from natural 
curiosity, partly in view of the use that the knowledge 
may be of, and partly from a purely intellectual sympathy 
with the real relations of things, an affection for intel- 
ligible statement not less strong and constant if less en- 
thusiastic than the passion of the artist for the beautiful. 
And besides all these pursuits, in which concern for the 
common good may have a secondary place, there are some 
who make the common good their end, and use and value 
the methods of art, science, government and industry as 
themselves means of secondary importance compared with 
the all-embracing ideal. 

It is not enough to enumerate the various goals of 
human ambition considered from the point of view of 
individual aspiration ; we have also to consider the im- 
personal best, the result which is naturally good for all, 
provided the needful functionaries can be met with for 
its development ; because the realities of the common life 
limit and condition the possibilities of individual attain- 
ment, as well as, more remotely, of individual desire. 
And we must therefore endeavour to give some precision 
to our ideas of the best social state possibly attainable in 
the approaching future, before trying to define the out- 
lines of individual duty which follow by implication as 
binding on all those who own the ideal. 

We speak of " politics " as a sphere offering interesting 
and absorbing occupation to rational men, and the ques- 



282 



NA TURAL LA W. 



tion then presents itself: What is the most acceptable 
political ideal ? Is a paternal or democratic government 
best for modern civilised communities? and when the 
form of government is settled, should its spirit be liberal 
or conservative, and what is the precise significance of 
those contrasted terms ? The only foregone conclusions 
to which the course of the argument has committed us on 
this subject are two, that progress is normal and privilege 
unjust ; in other words, that the ideal government must 
be prepared to recognise and direct the progressive de- 
velopment of its subjects, while it will reject the claim 
of any class or individual to be officially secured in the 
possession of more enjoyments than their neighbours, at 
the expense of the latter. The good of society, at any 
given moment, as distinguished from the interest of in- 
dividuals, may be held to consist in the attainment by 
the greatest possible number of its members of the 
greatest possible . amount of satisfaction of all their 
conscious desires and impulses. Social progress consists 
in the multiplication, among the greatest possible number 
of the community, of impulses, faculties and desires with 
their attendant possibilities of gratification. The doubts 
of those who question whether progress is in all cases 
necessarily a good, rest upon the practical experience that 
the multiplication of powers and sensibilities in some 
members of society may outstrip the development of 
general customs favourable to their habitually receiving 
the appropriate satisfaction. In an ideal state of things 
the function of Conservatism would be to protect, as far 
as possible, every extant source of public good, while the 
function of Liberalism would be to introduce as many 
new sources as possible of future good. The antagonism 
between the two tempers is due to the fact that, in a 
state of things which is far from ideal, the pursuit of 
new problematical good often entails the sacrifice of old 
sources of certain satisfaction, while on the other hand, 
an obstinate attachment to the latter may be powerless 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 283 



to arrest the growth of tendencies which can only be 
satisfied by innovation. 

According to this definition of social and progressive 
good, the ideal of society will be conceived as a continual 
approach, not towards any definite state, but towards 
the general diffusion among its members of increasingly 
various active powers, and increasingly intense and re- 
fined sensibility, such increase being further attended by 
a growing harmony between the indulgence of individual 
impulses and desires and the common good, present and 
to come. The opponents of any special, local progress, 
the purpose of which is to multiply the faculties and 
develop the sensibilities of a backward race, class, or 
sex, are committed to the pessimistic theory that per- 
manent defect in some members of the species is the 
condition of the utmost attainable perfection in the re- 
siduum. The opinion is supported by the high authority 
of Aristotle who makes it the ground of his defence of 
slavery. But modern history and reason incline us to 
the more cheerful view that the true cause, or sine qua 
non, of such modest progress as has hitherto resulted from 
human effort, has always been the possession of some 
positive ability by the superior portion of the species, not 
the inferior ability of another portion. 

The danger of cultivating additional ability in a class of 
ci devant inferiors is not chimerical, because the ability of 
existing superiors may not be equal spontaneously to the 
additional strain of supporting, directing, or assisting the 
new development towards ends of general social advantage. 
At the same time it may be remembered that even 
Aristotle, while arguing that it is a means of perfection 
to the inferior to obey superior authority, does not ques- 
tion the advantage to a superior of having as excellent 
subordinates as possible; and we have no reason to suppose 
that those sections of society now supposed to be the seat 
of natural authority and superior merit are in any way 
naturally less progressive, less capable of improving upon 



NATURAL LAW. 



their present condition, than those of their actual inferiors 
whose emancipation from injurious disabilities is recom- 
mended in the interests of the general progress of society 
as a whole. In our own country the political emancipa- 
tion of the masses has already gone so far that the im- 
portance of such remaining steps as the enfranchisement 
of women and agricultural labourers is mainly social, and 
is debated on corresponding grounds rather than on the 
strict base of political equity and expediency ; but it will 
perhaps conduce to clear and coherent thinking on these 
questions, which seem the more difficult from their mixed 
character, if each measure, as it becomes practically urgent, 
were to be dispassionately referred to some intelligible 
standard of desirability apart from the momentary inclina- 
tions or prejudices of disputants. And many will admit 
that the progressive good of society, as above defined, 
affords such a standard, who are by no means yet con- 
vinced that e.g., universal suffrage or compulsory education 
would appear desirable when tried by this standard. 

Even when the progress of society has been accepted as 
the final goal, there remain two rival schools of opinion as 
to what is or should be the precise aim and function of 
political government. This function may be either that of 
ordaining what is to be done, at the choice of its own 
plenary wisdom, or that of regulating in the most con- 
venient manner the doing of those things on which the 
will of the community is bent. An omniscient and 
benevolent dictator is the ideal of one party ; a competent 
delegacy appointed to harmonise conflicting and enforce 
wholesome customs is the ideal of the other. A sovereign 
assembly is virtually an elected monarch, who governs 
less than the ideal dictator, because the knowledge and 
good-will diffused through the many-organed body does 
not readily come to a head in practical commands, and, 
accordingly, enthusiasts for the principle of authority 
are dissatisfied with governments in which the popular ele- 
ment is as strong as in our own. One of the latest exponents 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 



2S5 



of tins view seems to think that adequate powers of 
direction might be developed in a few members of the com- 
munity if the remainder of the mass were predisposed to 
yield obedience to all beneficial commands, and that the 
accidental seizure of administrative power by persons dis- 
posed to use it for interested purposes might be remedied 
by a quasi-royal right of veto, or the power of changing its 
ministers, reserved to the community at large. 1 But 
whatever might be most intrinsically desirable, it does not 
seem to be the fact that the lapse of time tends to widen 
the gulf between the wisdom and vigour of the many and 
the few. The task of government conceived as wholly 
initiative grows more difficult every day from the greater 
variety and complication of the forces which have to be 
directed, and no proportionate development of mental 
grasp appears in the actual body of contemporary rulers. 
What does appear is a growing diffusion of political 
intelligence, and an increasing interest in the objects of 
good government among all classes, down to those most 
remote from any wish to direct the fortunes of the state as 
a whole. And it is for this reason that the party which 
chooses liberty rather than authority for its watchword, 
seems to represent the strongest objective tendencies of 
the day. The ideal of this school is the self-government 
of the community, the legislative assembly and its ministers 
having for their function to discern and record and give 
effect to the will of their constituents. Its justification 
lies, not in any optimistic faith in the all-wisdom of 
majorities, but in the conviction that no administrative 
manipulation can extract out of a nation more effective 
virtue than is in it; and that no artificial machinery for 
extracting the efficient virtue can be permanently relied 
upon to serve its primary purpose, while no community 
will refuse its consent to the best laws which its then state 
of virtue will allow it to observe. The complaints of 
modern anarchy appear to proceed from statesmen, amateur 

1 " Order and Progress." By Frederick Harrison. 



286 



NATURAL LAW. 



and professional, who feel their own powers to be equal to 
the task of forming plans for the good of the community, 
but not to the more difficult task of persuading the 
voluntary co-operation of those who are to be benefited by 
the execution of the plans. The heaven-born ruler knows 
better than his subjects what it is best for them to do; and 
rulers who are not heaven-born think that they might do 
quite as well as the missing great one, if the community 
would submit to the effort of seeing — without the com- 
pulsion of revelation — what is really for their own good. 
The liberal creed, on the contrary, is that those classes of 
the community which are capable of seeing what is for the 
general good, with the very moderate assistance afforded by 
contemporary politicians, are capable of knowing better than 
such politicians what is for their own good, except in cases 
where an obvious bias of egotistic inclination calls for 
correction by the enlightened self-interest of the whole 
community. The function of government, or the official 
organ of the public will, is to find out which are the 
strongest tendencies of the social body, and especially 
which can be made so by discreet administration. 

The use of a civilised government is to execute the 
people's will, whether the people knows its own mind or 
not, and certainly without looking to it for instructions, 
which it is rarely or never able to give, as to the way in 
which its will shall be carried out. Tor example, the 
people clamour for education before they have education 
enough to know what it is they are asking for ; but the 
demand gives a golden opportunity for any administration 
that has wit to offer the best education with a free hand, 
and strengthen itself by turning the excited clamours out- 
side into denunciation of any less adequate provision. We 
hold that a well-educated people is easier to govern — 
to the ends of civilisation — than one possessing all the 
qualities of rustic ignorance; but there are rulers who 
think differently, because in effect it is harder to govern 
the growth of a civilised nation than to keep the peace 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION 2Z7 



among a passively servile mass ; only for rulers who accept 
the more ambitious task there can be no via media, because 
when the work of education is begun it must either be 
directed towards an enlightened completion, or the masses 
will be left to all the dangers of partial instruction — self- 
taught as to their inclinations and claimable rights, but 
ignorant of the logical consequences of co-existent and 
reciprocal social obligations. One chief characteristic of 
a democratic age is the tendency to minimise the original 
distinction between government and legislation;! the 
administration of public affairs comes to be carried on on 
the same principles and with the same self-effacement of 
the rulers as are desirable in the case of civil legislation. 
The administration of the public services takes up an 
increasing part of the rulers' care, and tends increasingly 
to outweigh the importance of government in the primitive 
political sense, the commanding of the behaviour of differ- 
ent classes towards each other, or the determination of the 
external relations of the community. And a corresponding 
change appears to be taking place in the popular estimate 
of the rights and immunities of office-holders. The function 
of government used to be coveted as the post of highest 
dignity and power, but, until recently, it was assumed that 
the ruUr would give effect to his own will, and though he 
was always praised if his will was beneficent or judicious, 
the specific excellence of a ruler was supposed to consist 
more in the greatness of his power than in the wisdom or 
benevolence of its exercise ; in fact, virtue of a kind was 
recommended to rulers because certain forms of vice 
threatened the stability of their power rather than from 
any sense of moral responsibility on the part of the 
sovereign to the subject. 

The beginning of social organisation is made with the 
discovery that human beings can be of use to each other ; 
but this relation of service has two sides, and it is a 
curious psychological question why some services are held 

1 Vide supra, p. 36. 



288 



NATURAL LAW. 



to be honourable to the person by whom they are received 
and others to the person by whom they are rendered. 
Practically, the test applied seems to have been the action 
of free choice, will, or liking in the agent : it is a mark of 
inferiority to be compelled by force to do something dis- 
tasteful, and admiration or gratitude are not spontaneously 
felt, even for needful services, when these are not freely 
rendered. But again, in primitive society, as well as 
now, what is done voluntarily is assumed to have been 
done for the agent's own satisfaction, and in this way 
the intrinsically admirable element of ability — to do as 
one chooses — becomes associated with the strength of 
desires or passions which it would be harsh to call anti- 
social, though their indulgence may become so as soon as 
the struggle for existence has advanced a step, and there is 
competition between many, who are able to enjoy, for the 
means and ministers of enjoyment. The idea of rendering, 
voluntarily, services to others for their good is of tardy 
growth, and though there are always some qualities more 
useful and edifying to society than others, it is not always 
the same quality that bears away the palm of natural 
excellence or entitles its possessors to the strictly moral 
admiration which is reserved for voluntary serviceableness. 

Social organisation, or the multiplication of functions 
and exchangeable offices of service, begins, historically, 
with the want or wish of the strongest natures to be served, 
not with a magnanimous desire to serve, and indeed it 
would be a psychological impossibility for those who had 
had no experience of the convenience of service received 
to enter with sympathy into the natural desire of others to 
obtain the same advantage. By one of those pregnant co- 
incidences which lend a false air of rationality to the course 
of history, it was also historically true that the natural 
aristocrats who were best able in the first instance to serve 
themselves (and incidentally their inferiors, since indiffe- 
rent rule may be better than anarchy), were also best able 
to imagine means of exacting the less honourable kind of 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 289 



service in return. Considered in the abstract, the aptitude 
to issue commands and the aptitude to yield compliance 
are morally void and intellectually worthless ; everything 
depends upon the character of the commands issued, and 
the purpose and character of the compliance yielded. The 
improvident wilfulness of an oriental despot is as unrea- 
soning as the canine submissiveness of modern low-life 
Griseldas. The exercise of the former quality makes most 
immediate and undisguised addition to the suffering of 
sentient beings ; at the same time it is the caricature of a 
power, the reductio ad absurdum of a principle which may 
be thought to have contributed more to the general progress 
and benefit of humanity than the opposite habit of non- 
resistance. But again, the habit of commanding a tort et 
a travers can only be kept up by the help of a proportion- 
ate readiness to obey uncritically, and if social advance 
must in all cases be purchased by the juxtaposition of the 
two dispositions, it is impossible to localise the merit and 
responsibility for the joint result in either one of the con- 
tracting parties. Authority has no moral weight, as such, 
only we find, on the whole, that persons able to command 
obedience are, as a rule, able to invent services which are 
both agreeable to themselves, and also remotely serviceable 
to social growth and civilisation. And this observation 
serves retrospectively to justify the natural tendency of 
mankind to admire ability for its own sake. 

There is always some element of natural reason in a 
widespread, instinctive feeling, and we do feel that loyalty, 
like the best forms of religion, implies reverence for that 
which is above, not compassion for that which is below. 
To serve a superior may be a proud privilege, it is anyway 
an honourable obligation, but to serve the many-headed, 
the leather-sellers and sausage-makers of our modern 
demos — is that, we ask, the highest function of our best 
men ? or are our best men to leave their natural trade of 
shepherding to hirelings ? Are our heaven-born guardians 
to content themselves with dilettante criticism while 

T 



290 



NATURAL LAW. 



" politics " become a paid trade like cotton-spinning ? The 
latent disposition to acquiesce in snch a result forms one 
of our nearest social difficulties and dangers ; and yet it 
seems as if only a slight change of mental attitude were 
needed to set our feeling free to follow its natural bent, — 
to honour power most in its most efficient and influential 
manifestations. 

After all said and done, where is the great glory of hav- 
ing wants that inferiors can be made to supply ? True 
greatness consists in having better, larger wants than other 
men, and the ideal ruler at any rate, according to our pre- 
sent ideas, is the man whose strongest personal desire is for 
the righteous and felicitous organisation of the subject- 
classes. We despise equally the demagogue who makes 
himself the slave of the lower passions of the many, and 
the despot who makes the many slaves to the lower pas- 
sions of the one. The truest service that man can render 
to man is to make human life the better, and this is a ser- 
vice which the greater renders to the less ; but we associate 
the idea of service with subjection, and the subjection of 
the better to the worse is a moral contradiction. In times 
past this difficulty has been evaded by a phrase ; the Ee- 
deemer of men made Himself their servant, to teach them 
to serve each other for His sake. But we may ask, for 
whose sake did Christ serve ? And if the Christian model 
is divine, why should it be denaturalised by giving every 
Christian a different motive from that which moved his 
Lord ? Men have imagined and believed in a God ready 
to endure all things for the salvation of men ; leaving all 
legendary incongruities on one side, is it not thereby appa- 
rent that men are willing to give their best reverence when 
the higher consents to serve the lower, if thereby the ser- 
vice of the immaterial highest is to be advanced ? There 
is no touch of metaphysical mystery or sentimental asceti- 
cism in such a faith. The choice of the many may be 
determined or confirmed by the urgency of the few ; and 
in this God-forsaken world it is well for human voices to 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 291 



ring divinely. There is nothing unreasonable or unintel- 
ligible in our craving for a hero whose transcendent power 
shall be serviceable, and the would-be heroes of the day 
only miss the glories they would aim at for want of courage 
or discernment — or, perhaps, native heroism — enough to 
render the services on a sublimely ample scale. The right 
line is the shortest way between the two points of useful 
action and solid fame, and there is no abnormal severance 
of the natural connection between the two ends. It is true 
that we see signs of a growing indifference, not to say con- 
tempt, among the intellectual classes for what are called 
" politics," or the practical exercise of the power of ruling, 
which extends nearly indifferently to all shades of opinion, 
except advanced and militant radicalism. But this may 
be explained by the bent of aristocratic prejudice, which, 
having been brought to waive its claim to anti-social pri- 
vileges, still resists the democratic pressure of social obliga- 
tion. The formula " to every one according to his wants" 
has been applied in complete disregard of the aristocrats' 
hereditary want — to dominate ; and the aristocrats accord- 
ingly feel little inclination to accept the remaining clause, 
" from every one according to his powers," which would 
have re-established their superiority on a fresh basis. At 
the same time, disinterested ambition naturally proposes 
to itself attainable ends, and whatever kind of superiority 
a community is ready to recognise will be cultivated by 
those whose most selfish desire is for recognition— of their 
own merit, such as it may be. And the more reasonable 
popular demands can be made, the more prospect there is 
of inducing the natural leaders of society to accept the con- 
ditions on which their old ascendancy may be enjoyed. 

Here, however, we are met with another difficulty which 
hampers the development of political ideals with a com- 
manding charm. We concede that in the perfect life, 
action, feeling, and intelligence must go the same way, 
and not only personal but also sympathetic feelings and 
impulses have to be brought into harmony with each other 



292 



NATURAL LAW. 



and with the objective medium before the whole man can 
hope to accomplish the best destiny physically within his 
reach. But a reformer, by the nature of the case, lives 
and moves among the abuses he is labouring to remove, 
and unless he buries himself in the ranks of a small re- 
forming sect, seeing no prospect beyond the destruction of 
their own pet grievance, the reformer is indeed a kind of 
outcaste, a parasite of social ill, in whom the normal self- 
assertion of the Wille zum Leben would be an inconsistency. 
We protest on behalf of our leaders against their being 
called on to serve stupidity, and then, as a crowning com- 
pliment, we expect them to serve vice, and both services are 
a war of extermination. The practical difficulty is that an 
energetic and sensitive nature needs to feel the stream of 
tendency to be with it in its best efforts, or else lives a life 
of martyrdom, or rather, the half life of a mutilated soul. 
Hundreds of thousands among us are ready and willing to 
take their part in the orderly discharge of social duties, 
but they cannot feel it to be a duty to scramble for a 
function and vindicate their right to it in debate, and so 
they stand on one side ; and some say, What is the use 
of living when there is nothing useful to do ? and others, 
What is the use of doing anything useful if people would 
as soon have it left undone ? and others roundly, that life 
is tiresome, and we might as well be dead because there is 
" nothing to do," and no sufficient reason for doing that. 
Saints and sinners are agreed upon the one need of living 
somehow, and those who are embarrassed about the " how," 
find their difficulty increased by the very fact that society 
seems to have no fixed principles and intelligible rules, by 
respecting which a man can certainly put himself en rapport 
with the feeling of his neighbours. Society takes its mem- 
bers at their own valuation, and is slow to find fault with 
those who find no fault either with themselves or with 
their place in the world ; and yet society is too far from 
perfection to be able to afford itself the luxury of un- 
broken self-satisfaction, and it is neither right nor reason- 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 293 



able for us to blame reformers for the antagonistic attitude 
which we, on the whole, wish them to maintain. 

At the same time, the needful reforms would be already 1 
accomplished, and, therefore, no longer needed, if every one 
had a sufficiently lively sense of the need to take part in 
supplying it; and we might seem to be entangled in a 
vicious circle of conservatism, if it were not for the disin- 
terested way in which the spiritual nature even of the un- 
spiritual masses shoots ahead of their grosser propensities. 
Long before we have either the knowledge or the resolution 
needed for living an ideal life ourselves, we may feel the 
attraction of a high ideal and be ready to applaud and 
follow leaders of the highest ambition. The many must 
always depend upon the few for their best gifts and in- 
struction, but the few depend upon the good- will of the 
many for the crowning perfection as well as for the effi- 
ciency of their work, just because it is a part of the highest 
ability to be sensitive to external stimulus and external 
discouragement. It depends upon the many whether the 
best energy of the few shall spend itself in unavailing 
protests, in stern endurance, or in fortunate and fruitful 
action. We depend on ourselves (or on our antecedents) 
for our possibilities; we depend on our contemporaries 
and our surroundings for their realisation ; and, humiliat- 
ing as from some points of view the confession may seem, 
it does not rest altogether in our own hands to make the 
best of ourselves ; morally, a man is free from blame, nay, 
is deserving of the highest praise and admiration, if he has 
done his best under difficulties, but if we are to judge with 
the dispassionateness of science we may have to recog- 
nize the natural imperfection of the result that we are 
thus bound to praise; and the martyr of circumstances 
shares our feeling to an extent which is a part of the 
martyrdom, for there is no more bitter grief, short of 
remorse, to be known by men, than regret for the better 
tilings they might have done under a happier fate. But 
this discord between the verdict cf spontaneous feeling and 



2 9 4 NATURAL LAW. 

deliberate judgment is not naturally or necessarily per- 
manent. It is not reasonable for us to judge our chiefs 
by a standard which we do not allow them to reach, and 
it is not reasonable to withhold our sympathy from those 
who make it their business to pursue the very objects that 
our judgment approves. 

In point of fact, the mass of public feeling and opinion 
only wants concentrating, clarifying, and pouring forth, to 
prove itself, as it should be, at one with the best and 
strongest individual aspirations, which are now half- 
starved for want of such support. There have been times 
before now when the whole community accepted the same 
ideal, and had but one feeling towards those who spent 
their lives in its pursuit; and though our ideal cannot 
well revert to mediaeval simplicity, there is no reason why 
the reformers of the future should not be sustained by the 
same speculative appreciation of their work as that which 
made the miracles of monasticism possible in ages of even 
less moral culture than the present. Creeds may be 
believed in with personal fervour of conviction, or taken 
for granted as incuriously as most of us take for granted 
the revolution of the earth on its axis; but the path of 
social progress would be cleared of half its stumbling- 
blocks if we all either believed fervently, or else took for 
granted as an unassailable axiom of social faith 

That man's perfection is the crowning flower 
Toward which the nrgent sap in life's great tree 
Is pressing — seen in puny blossoms now, 
But in the world's great morrows to expand 
With "broadest petal and with deepest glow. 

Now, as always, each new step in advance must be taken 
with effort through opposition, but there is no reason why 
all those to whose share the burden of the effort falls 
should not find help in their need from the sense of a 
common faith giving promise of agreement, soon or late, 
between all who own it. And the promise will be kept 
when the creed is so deeply rooted in the hearts and 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 295 



minds of the majority that they only need to be assured 
of what it really commands in order to sacrifice their own 
interests or prejudices at its bidding. This is the true 
religion of humanity — so to honour and love the manifesta- 
tions of human strength, wisdom, and loving-kindness as 
to feel that in them the best is realised, and that for them 
the utmost of pain and labour may be dared and done. 
But living religions are congregational, and we want it to 
be a household word amongst the many, as well as a 
speculative conviction among the few, that the sufficient 
reason of human life is to be found in the lives of men 
and nowhere else, and that our collective stupidity is to 
blame if we do not feel, and let each other feel, that the 
forces which stir our souls have a right to stir them, and 
that not we, but those who remain callous to influences 
whose rightful powerwe confess, are the heretics andinfidels. 

The elements of harmony or natural human good are in 
our reach, if we could only agree to seek them; it is 
partly because we are not agreed upon a formula for the 
desired end that so many moderns dispense themselves 
from effort, saying that there is no end in view. We con- 
tend that social opinion is more nearly agreed upon an end 
than upon a formula, and that the true stumbling-block in 
our way is not the want of worthy and adequate employ- 
ment, but the objective difficulty of the task before us. In 
fact, the end which we desire most, an ideal organisation 
of civilised society, is so difficult that single efforts can 
go little way towards it; and the difficulty of the task 
placed before individuals is increased by the fact that each 
reformer has not only to see what he himself can do, but 
must include in his plan the fitting in of his efforts to this 
or that work of others. It is more reasonable to complain 
of such a mission being oppressively or impracticably hard 
than of an absolute " nothing to do," and we have no right 
to criticise the natural order for leaving us without a 
function if we decline the work naturally traced out for 
us, on the ground that it is too hard. 



295 



NATURAL LAW. 



The reason that the educated and leisurely classes suffer 
more from ennui than the hard-working poor, is that the 
habitual actions are done from weaker motives, and the 
problem of the day is to find and bring home to the will 
sufficiently strong motives for performing, if not the 
actions now habitual, some others in their stead. The shop- 
keeper or the manual labourer is entangled in a petty 
round of duties, not one of which can be omitted with 
impunity, and an equally irresistible pressure would be 
brought to bear upon every intelligent conscience if the 
workings of the social mechanism could be so vividly 
realised as to supply motives for larger doings and for- 
bearances, since the correspondingly large needs are an 
objective fact. At present it is given to very few to find 
mental rest and moral stay in a routine congenial to their 
mental tastes and moral cravings, but if we take a general 
survey of the whole field of human life and action, it 
can scarcely be said that, apart from the common human 
temptation to prefer the pleasant to the good, there is a 
general discrepancy between the tendency of existing 
motive forces and the latent w illin gness of men to move 
in this or that direction ; there is only an accidental and 
temporary divorce between the two conditions of con- 
tented and efficient action, which it is the object of an 
improved social organisation to terminate. 

There is one real objective good which we can never go 
wrong in taking as the goal of effort, the development of 
faculty and the arrangement of facilities for its exercise, 
and it may be urged that the good which is built up side 
by side with other goods — even though the latter may 
impose sacrifices — is still better, richer than an isolated 
final unprogressive attainment. But the chances of fric- 
tion are increased with every addition to the complexity 
of the social machine, and to minimise such friction we 
want every member of the community to be ready, not 
only to work well in his own place but to help his 
neighbours into the place or function for which they 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 297 



are naturally most fit ; not because they are most useful 
or least troublesome in such a place, but disinterestedly, 
because it is best for themselves, and when they have been 
got into the place that is objectively best for them, they 
should be helped with praise, sympathy, or compassion, to 
feel themselves at least comparatively well off in it. 

In the highest moral and religious sense, each member 
of a community depends upon the virtues of his neigh- 
bour to develop his own, so that the best good of all is 
bound up with that of each one, with a closeness that 
can never be attained by purely utilitarian calculations, 
The showiest virtues are perhaps those which stand out 
in relief against a dark background of opposing crime, 
as the veriest schoolboy is tempted by the fame of a 
martyred sage or patriot; but perfect virtue must be 
able to dispense with either foils or victims, and we 
must either renounce our faith in the perfectibility of 
mankind or find our way towards the acceptance of an 
altogether positive ideal. 

But if this way of looking at the common problem were 
generally accepted — as generally as the main dogmas of 
Catholicism five centuries ago — we should only have the 
intellectual and the practical difficulties of the position 
left to contend with. Strength and knowledge would not 
be left idle for want of good-will on the part of their 
owner, nor expended in vain for want of good-will 
amongst those interested in their exercise. Our wishes 
would be guides instead of tempters, an aid instead of a 
distraction in the serious work of life, and human action 
would again have a chance of approaching to the aesthetic 
perfection, which, in this case as in that of all other 
natural phenomena, belongs only to work done with an 
undivided soul, or by virtue of some natural harmony, 
recognisable after the event, though not perhaps to be 
analysed or deliberately invented beforehand. 

The value of a political formula and the significance of 
a political programme varies so widely with the change 



298 



NATURAL LAW. 



of circumstances, that it is hardly useful to dwell in 
detail on the purely political measures which seem now 
to he demanded as corollaries of our ethical creed. We 
agree with Utilitarian liberals in deprecating legal inter- 
ference with the self-regarding action of individuals, but 
we look upon it as the duty of the community — as the 
natural function of its collective wisdom — to provide the 
individual members of the social body with every possible 
facility for complete and healthy self-development. All 
are interested in the well-being of each, and even on 
Utilitarian grounds it may be argued that they have 
therefore a right to legislate for the personal advantage 
of. individuals, but there is a vast difference between 
the claim of individuals to legislate all at once for their 
own good, and the resolution of the authorised govern- 
ment to promote the well-being of every fraction of the 
subject group — all the difference, indeed, which we associ- 
ate with the contrasted terms of blind instinct and en- 
lightened reason. We should not get an exhaustive 
account of the phenomena of human life by merely 
adding together the vital motions of all the bodily 
organs; and, in like manner, it is only natural for the 
intelligent action of the social body to have a degree of 
organic unity and coherence, which would be wanting to 
a mere aggregation of individual wills. 

The matters of common interest which the state may 
be expected to care for with increasing efficiency with the 
increase of intelligence and unity of purpose among its 
members may be briefly summed up as the provision of 
good laws, good administration of the public services, a 
sound system of social and industrial economy, and a sound 
system of national education. The machinery of govern- 
ment is a point of secondary consideration, and the inter- 
national relations of the model state must inevitably be 
modified by the temper of the other civilised communities 
with which it is in relation. The duty, however, of such a 
state towards barbarous but improveable populations is 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 299 



more clearly uniform, and we should perhaps include 
among the functions of the state the direction of inde- 
pendent colonists in their dealings with aboriginal inhabi- 
tants, and perhaps even the organisation of some secular 
counterpart to Christian "missions" in those districts 
where the spontaneous relations of two races of unequal 
development are not likely to be altogether conducive to 
the best interests of both. 

With regard to laws, it will be remembered that we 
have not been able to lay down any absolute rule or 
standard of equity; now, as always, the best laws for a 
community are the best that it can be induced to obey 
faithfully and intelligently, and in the case of any special 
reform, it is a practical question how near an approach to 
the best possible rule the actual state of the community will 
admit. Mr. Herbert Spencer has almost exalted into the 
dignity of a natural law the observation that men in guard- 
ing against one evil are apt to find that their remedy itself 
has made room for another perhaps as bad. But there is 
no metaphysical necessity at work to perpetuate this simple 
result of human short-sight. Very often the reform carried 
out is not exactly the one proposed on the merits of the 
case, and the practically successful djpeupres has undesired 
consequences; but very often also the exact remedy, if 
proposed in time, might succeed as well and have no ill 
result at all, while in any case it is quite within the com- 
petence of human reason to foresee and guard against new 
opportunities for abuse incidentally provided by a measure 
in the main beneficial. 

It is faithlessness, verging on impiety, for one man to 
profess himself possessed of a remedy for social evil and to 
proclaim in the same breath that his wisdom is of no use 
because none of his fellows have the wit to see with him. 
What one man has seen all men may come to see or 
believe in, and we may even go so far as to question the 
value of a vision which can find no second seer. It is a 



3 oo 



NATURAL LAW. 



self-destructive caution which attempts nothing because it 
may not be able to accomplish all it would attempt, and 
we have not much tolerance for the weakness which lets 
a we cannot " wait upon " I would " in cases where power 
is optional and will contagious. We have a right to 
assume in theory that whatever is desirable is possible, 
and to act as if it were so, even though we know that our 
approach to the most desirable of all results — whatever 
that may be — will be infinitely gradual, and the date of 
its completion, therefore, practically out of reach. But the 
pursuit of perfection is independent of time and the con- 
tinuous life of nations or sects exists only in the continuity 
of effort towards one purpose, and thus to every genera- 
tion the sufficient reason for present effort is always the 
next step practically possible towards the supreme result, 
always present to the eye of faith, though never brought 
within the grasp of material possession. 

At any rate there can be no excuse for adjourning needful 
legislative reform based on the best contemporary practice 
carried out to all its logically consistent developments. 
What men can do, men can certainly describe systemati- 
cally, and a code is simply a systematic description of the 
different doings of men in their constant relations to each 
other. It is not necessary for any one to know by heart 
the innumerable varieties of fact upon which litigious 
issues may be raised, but it is eminently necessary for a 
civilised community to be in possession of a coherent set of 
principles, in accordance with which any possible number 
of cases may be uniformly decided, and it would be well if 
lawyers as well as moralists and politicians could gather 
together enough faith in human reason and courageous 
reliance on human energy not to despair of the heroically 
difficult task of ascertaining what is now, and for the next 
few centuries likely to be, the best practical rule for every 
kind of leading case. There always is a practical best, one 
course which appears more perfectly and unexceptionally 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 301 



suitable than any other, and with candour and diligence 
this course can be defined beforehand in outline fully pre- 
cise enough for popular needs. 

Thus we want a consistent and intelligible criminal law, 
which shall apportion the penalty for every offence to the 
heinousness of the offence estimated in view at once of the 
present injury actually inflicted on society by the crime, 
and the chronic injury, so to speak, inflicted on it by the 
moral perversity of the criminal. If the criminal is incor- 
rigible, the sole aim of legislation will be to protect society 
against his misdeeds, otherwise reform rather than retri- 
bution will be the aim of judicial sentences, and in a per- 
fectly ideal scheme, the old system of fines and the modern 
system of damages will probably be blent into an equitable 
method of compensation for wrongs as an alternative for 
the merely personal expiation of a penal sentence. All 
offences, old and new, from obsolete crimes of violence to 
the most recent developments of fraud, should be classed 
afresh upon an uniform plan, and the mere act of impartial 
enumeration would give rise spontaneously to a beginning 
of re- arrangement. Each act would be judged according 
to its actual character, and the anomalies arising from 
historical survivals — of penalties which have changed their 
significance for acts which have changed theirs — would be 
at once removed from cumbering the path of justice. The 
theory of legal wrong is, we know, much simpler than the 
theory of rights, but even this is not essentially unknow- 
able or inexplicable. Some laws we must have, bad laws 
we have had, good laws we might have, by virtue of the 
self-same facilities which enable us to have laws at all, 
only we are too idle to make them. 

The reasonable rights of persons over and against each 
other are perfectly assignable: sane adults are free to 
pledge themselves by contract to each other, and those 
contracts which are customary in the community, and 
which the community is interested in having faithfully 
observed, may be reasonably enforced by law upon either 



302 



NATURAL LAW. 



of the parties who had voluntarily entered upon the same. 
Contracts of marriage, of partnership, of hired service, are 
binding as the provisions of a positive law are binding, if 
the contract fulfils the conditions laid down for normal 
agreements of that particular kind ; but we want to be rid 
of all the archaic curiosities of legislation, which make 
one agreement involve another, that it has nothing to do 
with now, because six or seven centuries ago the two were 
customarily associated ; and we want still more urgently 
to be relieved from the incubus of archaic forms of con- 
tract which bind, perhaps to their mutual amazement, 
parties who omit to contract themselves out of the obliga- 
tion. In relations that are assumed to be permanent the 
legislature should provide a typical form of contract, 
available for all those who do not deliberately modify it, 
or who modify it in a direction which the law refuses to 
sanction (as if a servant sells himself for a slave), and this 
typical form should embody the last word of contemporary 
practical reason, which many of our present laws, concern- 
ing marriage, bankruptcy, legal procedure, and a variety 
of other topics, are far enough from doing as yet. 

The proprietary rights of persons offer a wider field for 
discussion, because there is not an absolute consensus of 
opinion as to their normal extent. All rights of perma- 
nent property in things are the creation of positive law, 
which makes itself the guardian of every man's posses- 
sions during the time when he is not in actual occupation. 
The metaphysical jurisprudence of the seventeenth cen- 
tury, finding proprietary rights established, assumed that 
they had an abstract and eternal right to State recognition, 
in virtue of some native inherent sanctity of their own ; 
and the early Utilitarians were equally peremptory in vin- 
dicating them to their fullest extent, in the name of the 
unmistakable personal interest of owners. Of late years, 
however, the wilder forms of socialism have shown a ten- 
dency to settle down into sober criticism of the history of 
special rights, with a view to the abrogation of those de- 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 303 



monstrably injurious to the public welfare. It is argued 
that what the law gave the law may take away, and the 
appeal is virtually from law to morality when the oppo- 
nents of change in the proprietary rights of individuals 
cry out about the injustice of a policy of confiscation, 
while the advocates of change are equally vehement about 
the iniquity of the existing partition. The best way of 
bringing the controversy to a manageable issue is to insist 
upon the distinction between the justice of rules and the 
expedience of facts, for Government, in those wider func- 
tions which include legislation, has to take account of 
both, and is legally, as well as morally, within the sphere 
of its competence in decreeing the gradual extinction of 
an obnoxious class of facts. 

The title of a Eussian noble to the possession of his 
serfs was legally good, but it was the creation of historical 
enactment ; and in England, at any rate, we should find 
few theorists prepared to characterise the emancipation as 
illegal. We should, however, find a good many who would 
justify that interference with the rights of ownership on 
the ground that one man has " no right " to own another, 
and that, in fact, positive law cannot give an indefeasible 
right to any power or privilege which is morally wrong. 
And this is the very contention of the qualified socialism 
of writers like Mill or Laveleye. It becomes then a ques- 
tion of fact, not of principle, whether any rights, of persons 
over things, now consecrated by law are morally unjust, 
i.e., generically mischievous to society, with its various co- 
equal and counterbalancing claims ; and if this be the 
case, of two things one, either the legal rights must be 
allowed to lapse into desuetude — as English landlords 
escaped the tax of compulsory emancipation by allowing 
their villeins to drift gradually into prescriptive liberty — 
or they must be authoritatively limited to the measure of 
general practical expediency. The question whether it is 
just for the law to sanction every possible development of 
proprietary rights only arises in practice when the actual 



304 



NATURAL LAW. 



development of those rights has resulted in an extremely 
unequal distribution of the national wealth. Such ine- 
quality is a social evil, and we deny the perfect equity of 
law which sanctions the development of social evils. A 
right conferred by the community should be regarded as a 
trust, for which the holder is responsible to the sovereign 
power by whom it was conferred ; but if the exercise of 
legal rights and liberties is to be avowedly independent of 
moral restrictions, the law, which is never bound to sanc- 
tion immorality, may at any time withdraw the liberty 
which has been abused in practice, 

Let us suppose that at the date of the emancipation of 
the serfs, all Eussia had been the property of the nobles, 
and that the traditional hold of the villagers on the soil had 
been ignored ; suppose further that the nobles had been 
bribed to consent to the emancipation by the promise of 
salaried offices under the Government, and that the 
whole class had with one consent begun to live upon its 
salaries in St. Petersburg and Moscow, leaving the rural 
districts waste for shooting-grounds. In a few years from 
such a beginning, the condition of the peasantry would have 
become such that the country would have had to choose 
between civil war and an agrarian law. We deny that 
there can be wrongs without an equitable remedy, and we 
assert the right of the State in such a case to ordain a re- 
distribution of proprietary rights in a manner more con- 
ducive to the common good or the interest of the nation 
as a whole. This is an extreme, or rather an imaginary 
case, but minor grievances may be rectified in accordance 
with the same principle, subject only to the general con- 
sideration which is at the bottom of all reasonable dread 
of revolutionary reform. The foundation of social stabi- 
lity and well-being is the security of life and property 
afforded by association. The assurance of this stability lies, 
we hold, in the natural regularity of men's desires and im- 
pulses taken in the mass, but those who look upon mankind 
as by nature lawless and only kept in order with difficulty 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 



by heaven-sent pastors and masters, are naturally staggered 
by the proposal to make the self-estimated good of the 
community the standard of justice and the rule of law. 
"We contend that all laws and contracts may be safely 
submitted for revision if they are found to work unsatis- 
factorily in practice, provided the test applied is taken 
from the general interest, in its most liberal sense, not 
from the personal interest of either party to the quarrel ; 
and we cannot doubt that this test of general utility will 
enforce the needful degree of stability and discourage any 
tendency to apply larger remedies than are desirable to 
small and temporary inconvenience. 

The only kind of proprietary rights that have been 
seriously called in question in this country are those 
touching the possession of land ; and though we are far 
from saying that the present state of things is so bad as 
to call for exceptional legislation, we unhesitatingly assert 
in principle the right of the community to dispossess the 
whole body of landowners of any part of their present 
privileges which they may be found on investigation to 
abuse habitually. Practically, it would be most unfortu- 
nate for the need of exercising such a right to arise, and it 
is more desirable, and even more probable, that landowners 
should become increasingly scrupulous in exercising their 
present legal rights than that the rights should be forcibly 
curtailed. The danger, however, of provoking exceptional 
legislation to deal with special inconveniences that would 
be better dealt with by voluntary self-denial, is increased 
by the maintenance of special legislation surviving from 
the times when exceptional privileges were fearlessly and 
openly secured to certain sections of the community. If 
land circulated as easily and descended as equitably as 
personal property, there would be less need and less desire 
to insist on the natural difference which there is between 
a kind of property of which the supply is limited by 
natural causes and kinds that can be indefinitely multi- 
plied by human industry. It is one of the results of civi- 

u 



3o6 



NATURAL LAW. 



lisation to make the personal possession of land less 
and less of a necessary of life; but certain uses of the 
land, as to dwell on it, to cross it, to be provided with its 
perishable fruits, and to be able to rest at intervals in 
sight of its uncontaniinated verdure, are necessary to so 
rapidly increasing a population as to menace the theore- 
tical right of dukes and millionaires to appropriate whole 
counties to serve as sites for picturesque private hermi- 
tages, or as happy hunting-grounds for a select group of 
well-born barbarians. 

Suppose — as seemed not improbable in the first half of 
the century — that the wealth acquired by commerce and 
manufactures were to get habitually concentrated in as few 
hands in proportion as the landed estates of the country, 
while the labouring millions continued on the verge of 
pauperism : we should then apply to existing methods of 
production and distribution the same standard of criticism 
as is invoked in the case of land laws. There is some- 
thing wrong either in the laws or manners of a people in 
which such extremes of wealth and poverty are the rule; 
and though the corruption of manners cannot be directly 
remedied by law, the law is at no time bound to sanction 
consequences adverse to its own spirit. 

Suppose an industrial population so ignorant and inert 
as to be incapable of making reasonably equitable terms 
with the employers of labour, while the latter were de- 
terred by no scruples of prudence or humanity from 
driving the hardest bargain they could get ; it would be 
then within the competence of the legislature to fix a 
minimum rate of wages, and maximum hours for work, in 
order to give the servile population a chance of developing 
the power of self-protection — as in times past a maximum 
price has been fixed for commodities, in the hope of pro- 
tecting consumers against the arts of monopoly. This is 
practically how a civilised government acts towards two 
classes, of oppressors and oppressed, both belonging to an 
inferior subject race ; but the case is imaginary, because 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 307 



the government in modern states is naturally recruited 
from the propertied classes, and it is scarcely likely that 
a class whose members were individually so unscrupulous 
as to need a government check on their exactions should 
be willing, collectively, to impose such a check on them- 
selves. We only give the extreme case, in order to assert 
the general principle in regard to all kinds of property, 
that the claim to State protection for extant legal rights is 
conditional upon their being exercised in conformity with 
civic duty, as recognised by the official conscience of the 
community. And if law may in this way interfere to rec- 
tify the tendencies of bad customs and low morality, much 
more may it hereafter come to sanction and enforce the 
observance of better customs than those now prevailing, 
as soon as they have spontaneously established themselves, 
When the majority of rich men look upon themselves as 
functionaries charged with a special debt towards society, 
and hold it a part of their privilege to discharge the debt, 
many rights, which are now unquestioned will then be 
classed with such antiquarian curiosities of semi- civilisa- 
tion as the droit de seigneur, or the sale of feudal wards. 

We must not venture to pursue in detail the discussion 
which invites us, of special measures of legal reform, as 
tried by the test of universal practical expediency and 
morality. Nor need we dwell in detail on the develop- 
ment of various branches of the public service, when 
governments apply themselves undividedly to the task of 
ministering to the common good. In spite of manifold 
practical imperfections, it would be dishonest and ungrate- 
ful to deny that within the last quarter of a century real 
and permanent advances have been made in this direction. 
We have seen with our own eyes the beginnings of an 
application of science to the regulation of matters of com- 
mon interest, which must inevitably expand until the 
whole physical police of the country is brought methodi- 
cally under the control of its organised common sense, — 
not of a scientific hierarchy, entrenched behind a veil of 



3o8 



NATURAL LAW. 



esoteric mysteries, or a parasitic army of Chinese func- 
tionaries and salaried examinees, but a body of public 
servants, whose business it should be to keep the country 
healthily habitable, and to facilitate the maximum develop- 
ment of its material resources. Even now we have func- 
tionaries to whom a place in the public service means an 
opportunity for productive work, and not either a sinecure 
or a share in the mechanical routine of administrative 
circumlocution. This is the sane and living side of our 
civilisation, most easily undervalued by those who shut 
their eyes to its existence. The demand for such intelli- 
gent and conscientious service will go on increasing with 
growing intelligence of the needs of the community ; and 
as in all cases a want is more easily felt than supplied, no 
conceivable improvement in the standard of popular and 
academical instruction is likely to keep pace with the de- 
mand for thorough and versatile ability in the Civil Ser- 
vice; and if the State is thus exacting, private under- 
takings, we may be sure, will not put up with inferior 
administration. And as half the force and knowledge 
that are wanted to reach ends which we already see to be 
desirable would suffice to disclose fresh ends, vast and 
remote enough to provide arduous work for generations of 
our grandchildren, it is clear that local accidents and per- 
sonal ill-luck are more in fault than the natural order of 
things in general, if so many of us find wholesome action 
impossible for want of a clear and cogent end. 

Meanwhile the obvious function, for those who have no 
other, is to criticise their more fortunate neighbours ; and 
it must be admitted that the different grades of our in- 
dustrial population, who are probably on the whole better 
satisfied with themselves and with the harmony of their 
own mode of life with the " spirit of the times," than any 
other equally considerable section of the community, are 
still far from having attained to an ideal organisation of 
their own pursuits. In touching on the law of property, 
we were reminded of the social and economical difficulties 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 309 



attendant on the acquisition and distribution of wealth ; 
but we have no wish to disallow the claims of political 
economy to rank as a separate science with laws of its own 
quite independent of positive institution, and facts which 
fall into special relations among themselves. Many defi- 
nitions of the subject-matter of the science have been 
offered, but for our present purpose, as we consider the 
phenomena of production and distribution in relation to the 
nett social result, not to the several motives which lead 
individuals to contribute to it, we may describe the science 
as dealing with the remuneration of services and the ex- 
change of commodities. Most professional writers on this 
subject are anxious to exclude any importation of ethical 
considerations, and to describe only the natural, not the 
right way of paying for services and estimating values ; or 
the way in which people do, rather than that in which 
they ideally should transact their bargains. And in this 
they are certainly right : commerce may be moral, just as 
science, art, or religion may be moral, but morality is not 
a part of its essence ; only, as all normal pursuits alike 
tend to constitute themselves in the only way in which 
they can permanently survive as parts of our natural life, 
commerce as well as all the rest tends slowly and pain- 
fully towards an organisation which shall be altogether 
acceptable to the whole of our nature, or, in other words, 
to a state of natural morality in its methods and processes. 

We do not ourselves believe in the existence of any such 
antagonism as some economists accept, between the natural 
and the right, and it is in the interests of speculative truth 
rather than of practical morality that we should wish the 
foundations of economical theories to be widened. Poli- 
tical economy, as at present understood, affirms the natural 
value of everything to be just what it will fetch, i.e., what 
somebody is willing to give for it. The unknown is to be 
measured by the uncertain, and the only possible inference 
is that nothing"has any natural value at all, only an always 
varying competition price. But supposing this chronic 



NATURAL LAW. 



uncertainty as to the normal rule of exchange for services 
or commodities to be a source of economical inconvenience, 
we cannot think that there is any such metaphysical sanc- 
tity in the principle of competition as to preclude tradesmen 
from making use of some other test. In practice, indeed, a 
certain mean value for most common articles of commerce 
is, in fact, established by the help of all naturally relevant 
considerations, and the fluctuations of the market are in the 
main conditioned by accidents, which really do for the mo- 
ment alter the proportion of supply and demand, and so cause 
a natural rivalry of competition on one or other side. But 
it is misleading to speak of competition as par excellence the 
economical motive, to the exclusion of still more indispen- 
sable elements in the estimation of price or value. The 
two primary elements in the value of services or commo- 
dities are, on the one hand, cost, on the other utility : 
scarcity or abundance in proportion to demand may mo- 
dify the natural value fixed by those two considerations, 
but it cannot fix a value by itself. What costs nothing or 
is of no use (real or conventional) can have no market 
value, whether it be as common as moonshine or as rare 
as the transit of Venus. The competition price of things, 
in fact, varies between limits which are fixed by their 
natural value. An article of absolute necessity, such as 
food, may be worth — to the man who wants it — the whole 
of his other possessions which are of less use to him 
than the life they might buy ; but men cannot give more 
than they have got, and even the competition price of 
bread in a famine is limited, first by the total sum of 
wealth available for its purchase, and secondly, by the 
depreciation of all other kinds of wealth except food, when 
all the community is ready to give everything it has for 
that alone. 

Similarly with regard to the price of services, a man 
will pay for labour which is necessary to his life as for 
any other commodity, but he will not buy work that he is 
able to do for himself if the price is more than his persona] 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 311 



ease and leisure are worth to him ; and on the other hand, 
men who live by the sale of their labour will rather fight 
or starve than labour continuously without prospect of 
earning what they regard as the necessaries of life in 
return. Just as there is a natural limit — namely, the 
extent of our possessions, to the highest possible price 
of necessaries, there is also a natural limit — namely, the 
extent of our wants, to the lowest possible price of the 
labour by which necessaries are produced. A slave can 
be made to work himself to death in an average period 
of five or ten years ; free labourers can be brought — have 
been brought — to labour under conditions which give a 
scarcely higher average length for the term of able-bodied 
industry. But slaves and labourers rise in insurrection at 
the point — whenever it may come — at which the image of 
their own death comes so near to them as to overshadow 
the prospect of living miserably for a few days more if 
they don't risk instant death in a struggle for liberty and 
life. The love of life is the most elementary of economical 
facts, for our first conception of utilities is derived from 
what we call its necessaries, and the wish to procure these 
necessaries is the first motive that urges men to industrial 
production and commercial exchange. 

The double fallacy of economical writers is to lose sight 
of this starting-point ; ignoring the elements of cost and 
utility, they take the proportion of supply and demand as 
the sole guide to the price of commodities, and then pro- 
ceed to treat human labour as an inanimate commodity, 
subject to the same unlimited depreciation of price under 
variations of demand as air and water. No scarcity of 
demand — natural or artificial — will cause a commodity to 
be continuously brought to market at less than its cost, 
and the strict cost of labour is the maintenance of the 
labouring population. If the maintenance is murderously 
inadequate, we have peasant wars and bread riots — unless 
indeed the latter are claimed by economical enthusiasts as 
only an extreme form of the "higgling of the market," 



312 



NATURAL LAW. 



which fixes the price of bread as well as the rate of wages. 
There is, however, this difference between labour and other 
commodities. If the labourer can live as he pleases with- 
out selling his labour, no urgency of demand will bring 
him into the market, but if he can only live by the pro- 
ceeds of his labour, no slackness of demand can modify 
his desire to sell. The demand may fall so much short 
of the supply that the natural competition price of the 
labour — if it were not alive — might be brought down 
below the minimum cost or what is known as a subsistence 
wage. But even when this minimum has been reached, 
the supply of labour may still be in excess of the demand, 
and as it is not possible to stimulate demand by yet further 
reduction of price, we may have a minimum of absolutely 
unsaleable labour. 

Economists of the strictest school, i.e., the Malthusian, 
will say — unsaleable commodities lie on hand till they rot, 
and when some of them have rotted away and others are 
worn out by use, the demand revives for a season. What 
the economists do not see is that this decomposition of a 
live portion of the community is not a simple economical 
process, but on the contrary a grave political act, charged 
with political risks and entailing serious responsibility on 
the timocracy which may — the police force aiding — cause 
it to be peaceably accomplished. " Unsaleable " is not a 
simple epithet describing some quality of the labour; it 
refers to the accidental proportion existing between the 
desire of the propertied classes to be worked for in this or 
that way, and the need of the class without property to 
dispose of its labour, somehow to somebody, for a main- 
tenance. If we imagine an immense accumulation of 
manufactures, and a sudden arrest of enterprise and 
imaginative cupidity, the capitalist class might, for a 
generation, dispense with nearly all labour but that of 
personal servants; in this case all the labour of the 
operative class would become unsaleable at once; and 
the principles of utilitarian morality would be invoked 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 



3*3 



in vain to prove it to be the duty of the majority to 
prefer the alternative of collective suicide to civil war. 
There is no such sanctity about the commercial gospel 
as to give it a right to State protection when it has landed 
its professors in a political dilemma. There is no reason 
why all classes should not buy in the cheapest and sell in 
the dearest market if it suits their convenience, but if the 
cheapest market is a pest-house, and the dearest a hell, 
the care for life, of body and soul, may take precedence of 
zeal for a per-centage. And because buyers and sellers 
alike have to live a human life as members of the same 
human community, we deny that it is in any peculiar or 
permanent sense " natural " for the master of the situation 
— whether he be buyer or seller — to push his economical 
advantages to the limits beyond which civil war begins. 
It is economically possible for him to do so, just as Man- 
chester merchants may shut themselves out from the 
markets of China by the immoderate adulteration of their 
goods ; but though both courses may be forms of com- 
petition, and, therefore, of an economical nature, they 
may be ill-judged economically as well as socially and 
politically ; and in the interests of economical science we 
must protest against the notion that miscalculations are 
"economical" if they are made by persons desirous of 
driving a good bargain, while sound estimates of price 
and value are not economical unless direct personal interest 
has served as a guide for their formation. 

Already, even within the commercial camp itself, voices 
are beginning to raise themselves in honest practical un- 
certainty as to the lawful extension of this idea of cheap- 
ness in the market. It is not lawful to buy stolen goods 
however cheap, but is it lawful to buy the goods of an 
insolvent debtor when he offers them as cheap as if his 
object were — and is it our business to know whether it 
is — to steal away as much of his assets as he can before 
going into liquidation ? Political economists of the old 
school would say it is no affair of one tradesman whether 



3H 



NATURAL LAW. 



his neighbour is honest or no; the thing is to make a 
profitable bargain while there is a chance. But how if a 
form of enterprise grows up which consists in buying up 
the stock-in-trade of bankrupts just before they fail, and 
selling them at prices with which honest tradesmen can in 
no way compete ? We have here goods sold a miracle of 
cheapness, but does political economy forbid our discern- 
ing that by such transactions the rogues and the receivers 
derive a profit, earned in no sense by their own industry, 
but purloined by their astuteness from the honest credi- 
tors of one rogue and the honest competitors of the other ? 
It will be said, perhaps, that sales with intent to defraud 
are already illegal, but if we once admit that a purchaser 
is bound to satisfy himself that the other party to the 
contract has a right to sell — and is only the more bound 
to do so if the proffered goods are suspiciously cheap, the 
thin end of the wedge of moral responsibility is inserted, 
and every kind of fraudulent cheapness may be condemned 
alike, whether it be the fruit of stolen or half-paid labour, 
or of stolen or half- withheld workmanship, or of sharp 
practice in the actual market. 

It is practically impossible that every one, in making a 
special bargain for immediate profit should look forward 
to all the consequences of his own decisions and the con- 
sequent actions of others. An average mind would give 
way under the strain, and political economists generally 
sanction the disposition of the average trader to leave de- 
liberately out of account everything but the clearly visible 
personal advantage. But the pursuit of a clear, present, 
personal advantage, if uncontrolled by general considera- 
tions, may entail unnecessary loss to other persons or 
classes ; that is to say, the individual might be able to do 
as well by himself, and better by other people, if he recog- 
nised positive duties to the latter, instead of seeking the 
shortest road to doing well by himself alone. Experience 
fails to bear out the optimistic assumption of utilitarian- 
ism, which has its stronghold in political economy ; that 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 315 



the whole sum of lawful motives will certainly and always 
press in the way of personal inducement upon each indi- 
vidual agent, so that each several centre of consciousness 
will always feel, by direct experience, the force of all those 
manifold converging lines of tendency which in the long 
run, by their joint action, certainly do lead the majority of 
men to act in conformity with the general good. If the 
calculations of self-interest were always so providentially 
inspired, we do not see why economists should need to 
distinguish as they do between economical and moral 
propriety. But if the economical as well as the moral 
interest of the whole community is liable to demand 
sometimes, from some individuals, conduct not exactly 
coincident with the promptings of personal inclination, 
then it seems certain that economical science, instead of 
contenting itself with the empirical a peu pres of competi- 
tors bargaining, will lay down some general principles or 
rules in accordance with which the general welfare may 
be most economically secured. 

The destruction of forests by the first settlers in a new 
country is a typical example of discrepancy between the 
counsels of private and public prudence. Such settlers 
may not, perhaps, live to see the price of timber rise to a 
remunerative point, but the settlement, if it survives them, 
will infallibly before long regret the idle waste of a long 
inheritance of natural growth, which, as often as not, is of 
no real service, even for the moment, to its perpetrator. The 
history of the American oil-wells, 1 gives a still more compen- 
dious illustration of the inadequacy of selfish calculations 
to protect a most obvious public interest. When the oil- 
springs were first tapped, the oil was so accessible and so 
incredibly abundant, that its commercial value fell almost 
to zero on the spot ; hence reckless waste and the actual 
destruction of large quantities of a valuable natural com- 
modity. The means of lighting cheaply some millions of 
houses were squandered because the first owners were con- 

1 Professor Owen on 11 Petroleum and Oil Wells," in Fraser, for Oct. 1875. 



3i6 



NATURAL LAW. 



scions of no personal inducement not — if the trite proverb 
may be allowed — to kill the goose with the golden eggs if 
the contents of her ovary at death were sufficient to provide 
themselves with a fortune on which to retire luxuriously. 
The oil was first depreciated by its abundance, and then 
had its commercial value increased by the waste, which 
made it again, by comparison, prematurely scarce. The 
common interest suffered by the needless destruction of an 
article of natural utility, and out of the crowd of specula- 
tors making haste to be rich, the success of some entailed 
the failure of others, so that unless we think gamblers pru- 
dent, because every gambler hopes he will be the one to 
break the bank, it cannot even be said that the individual 
speculators understood their own interest better than if 
they had sought to make the best of the natural store for 
all concerned. In commerce, as in personal morality, fore- 
thought is the beginning of altruism, and if the individual 
were but immortal, he would live to expiate every dis- 
regard for the interest of his neighbour or posterity ; but as 
one age is as near to science as another, the general rule 
which is to provide a check for the anti-social vagaries of 
speculation, and alleviate the natural calamities of dearth, 
must fix the standard for the normal value of services and 
commodities in reference to their permanent utility to the 
many, not their occasional saleableness by the owners. 

In the often-quoted case of a shipwrecked crew, the 
scanty stores of food are not put up at auction to the 
highest bidder, but dealt round by common consent as far 
as they will go ; the demand for food is far in excess of 
the supply, and every member of the group would be glad 
to diminish the supply of hungry mouths, but no one 
dares to say to the other, as a Malthusian millowner to 
the mob at his gates — Get a few of you starved or 
hung, and then come back and bargain. And the true 
nature of social problems is not altered, only disguised, by 
their additional magnitude and complexity. The poorest 
country of modern times has never been so poor that its 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 317 



whole wealth would fail to find its population in bread 
and cheese and fustian, and yet capitalists once and again 
have told the swarming millions to make themselves 
scarce, because there is not wherewithal to pay their 
labour, meaning that there is not enough to pay their 
labour out of the surplus left after the supply of every 
other want of those in whose hands the wealth of the 
country is accumulated. 

The fact is that we find it best, as a rule, " that they 
should take who have the power, and they should keep 
who can," because there is no sufficiently independent and 
capable human tribunal to revise the spontaneous adjust- 
ment of natural recompense for natural ability. But when 
the organisation of society has advanced so far that many 
social prizes are awarded by a concatenation of chances, 
in which ability plays no part at all, society has a right 
to revise deliberately the result of its involuntary awards, 
and to lay down the conditions under which individuals 
shall be allowed to enjoy the "unearned increment" of 
natural advantages which the social compact bestows on 
the favourites of fortune. We do not assert the right of 
the many to confiscate periodically the accumulated heri- 
tage of the few. The momentary benefit derived by the 
less wealthy from such a redistribution of existing pro- 
perty would be much more than compensated by the dis- 
couragement of industry in all classes, and the substitu- 
tion, at best, of one kind of anti-social exploitation of man 
by man for another, privileging, in fact, the improvidence 
of Esau instead of the wiliness of Jacob. But as the one 
indefeasible natural right (and duty) of society is to con- 
sult the greatest possible advantage of all its members, it 
is clear that we are justified in regulating the distribution 
of those gifts of fortune which are not the reward of per- 
sonal merit, so far as can be done without discouraging 
the development of such merit. Merit is discouraged by 
legislation which robs it of its comparatively near and 
natural, though incidental, advantages ; but it is also dis- 



3i8 



NATURAL LAW. 



couraged by legislation, or legislative inertia, which allows 
the incidental rewards of merit to he paid, like prize- 
money, to the heirs-at-law of long-departed valour, instead 
of to those still engaged in the battle of life ; and if too 
large a share of the good things of life, available for the 
living generation, is reserved for the descendants of those 
who lived well or wisely before it, society is pauperised 
and left without wages to recompense the living services 
rendered to itself. 

It would not be possible, even if it were desirable, to 
induce any class or classes to acquiesce permanently in a 
rate of exchange for services or commodities which was 
deliberately unjust to one party to the contract, that is to 
say, deliberately out of relation to their natural equiva- 
lence as spontaneously estimated by our present feelings 
and judgment. But it is eminently desirable, if it can be 
shown to be possible, for all sections of the community to 
agree upon a common measure of social value, and to be 
guided in their particular bargains by a general opinion as 
to the comparative merit or use of proffered services ; and 
supposing the common conscience and common sense to 
be intent on promoting the common welfare, the commu- 
nity might, as it were, insure itself against the risk of 
those local disturbances of the natural equity of exchange 
which distress society when the ordinary course of peace- 
ful competition is embittered by positive scarcity or un- 
satisfied want. The natural value — using the words in 
their highest sense — of any service or commodity is com- 
mensurate with its fitness to contribute to the natural 
good or perfection of the community making use of it. 
Supposing such a — by no means inconceivable — degree 
of enlightenment to be reached by an industrial commu- 
nity as that both the giver and the receiver of any cus- 
tomary service should be aware of its social importance or 
insignificance, and accept, as a matter of course, the remu- 
neration proportioned to the estimation in which it was 
held on both sides, the accidental scarcity or abundance 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 319 



of one commodity as compared with another would be 
accepted as a common loss or a common gain, instead of 
the whole profit or loss being allowed to lie where it falls, 
at the unguarded cast of hazard. 

One of the most pressing and difficult questions of the 
day is this concerning the natural rights and natural 
duties — if we allow both to have a rationally recognisable 
existence — of the labouring classes. Is it, we are com- 
pelled to ask, is it their duty, i.e., is it for the common 
good, that they should acquiesce voluntarily in the work- 
ing of a system of competition which may end by pointing 
out to them the last resource of self-destruction? Are 
they, in fact, bound to make their work as much like a 
brute " commodity," and as little like a reasonable service, 
as they can ? The way in which the question presents 
itself to the different sections of a commercial and indus- 
trial community like our own is practically this : When, 
from a variety of circumstances, which no one has planned, 
and of which no one clearly understands the history, there 
is a present discrepancy between the demand for labour 
on the part of those who have the means of paying for it, 
and the supply of labour seeking to be paid for, is it the 
capital or the labour that should suffer diminution in its 
share of the gross profits of the national industry, or is 
the loss to be divided between them ? and if so, who is to 
determine in what proportions ? 

Trade unions, the great instrument for fixing wages by 
other considerations than simple competition, do not in 
practice accept the theory of a "wages fund" of fixed 
amount; they take the whole wealth of the country as 
the source from which the remuneration of labour and 
capital must be derived, and they do not see why the 
division of the national inheritance should take place — to 
borrow a significant technicality— per stirpes rather than 
per capita; i.e., by proportioned division between two 
stocks (whether of different race or different class) with- 
out regard to their numerical strength. Of course, it is 



320 



NATURAL LAW. 



not to be expected that men of scanty education, and 
opinions formed under the immediate pressure of personal 
feeling, should be able to correct the plausible generalisa- 
tions of the class above their own, in which opinions are 
formed in accordance with fixed habits of feeling, them- 
selves formed at leisure by the general tendency of in- 
terested motives. At the same time, it is clear that unless 
these habits of feeling have been formed under healthy 
conditions, the ideas answering to them will be no better 
guides than the passion or inclination of the moment, 
though they may have an impressive air of calm fixity 
which, unluckily, is attainable by prejudice as well as 
reason. 

The crude notion of the trade unionist is, that a combi- 
nation of workmen to limit the quantity of work turned 
out by the vendors of labour will result in raising the 
price by diminishing the supply of the article on sale, so 
that, while less work is being done, the mechanical action 
of supply and demand will make the workman's share of 
the gross wealth of the country larger. Malthus proposed, 
as an economy, that men should die, or never see the light ; 
these too docile followers propose, as an economy less jar- 
ring to some of our prejudices, that those who live should 
copy the unproductiveness of the dead, as a means to the 
same happy result of causing the fruits or wages of indus- 
try to circulate more freely. The crude notion of the 
economists, on the other hand, is that society can some- 
how make a good thing out of the necessities of its mem- 
bers, and get more work out of them for the same or less 
equivalent the more urgent their need to receive the equi- 
valent. Most economists regard the unionist's view as 
rank heresy — an uneconomical limitation of supply — but 
we fail to see why it is more of an economical heresy for 
the labourers to hold back their superfluous industry from 
an overstocked market than for a manufacturer to do the 
same with his goods for as long as he can afford. There 
is a short-lived profit to the consumer if the manufacturer 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 321 



sells his stock at a loss rather than not sell at all ; and 
there is a profit to the manufacturer if the labourer, rather 
than not sell his labour, sells it for starvation wages. But 
social science would be another name for pessimism if men 
were debarred from the calculation of any but immediate 
consequences, and labourer and manufacturer alike have a 
right to consider the social tendencies of bargains that 
they both have to spend a lifetime in carrying out. 

The real difficulty lies elsewhere, for the restricted 
employment of labour certainly diminishes the capital 
fund out of which labour, as well as everything else, has to 
be paid ; and if the will of the labourer is once allowed to 
count as an economical force, it is as much within his option 
to refuse to give his work for less share than he thinks 
equitable in the capital fund, as it is to aim indirectly at 
compelling the employers of labour to offer better terms 
by limiting the number of available labourers. The way 
the case practically presents itself is this : in a particular 
trade, or for a special season, the number of labourers is 
slightly in excess of the demand, i.e., there is more work 
wanted than is to be had. Economists expect the labourers 
to bid against each other for the first chance of earning 
wages ; while trade societies look upon the competition of 
workmen against each other for the coveted work as an 
evil to the class, and a doubtful gain even to the indi- 
vidual. If the wages fund were for the moment rigor- 
ously limited, say to the equivalent of is. a day for every 
adult labourer throughout the country, trade unions would 
urge each man to take his is. a day in peace, instead of 
bidding against his neighbours for the privilege of selling 
2s. worth of work for is. 6d. ; and they believe that the 
result of unregulated competition among labourers, who 
treat their industry as a commodity subject to unlimited 
depreciation, will be to tempt those who are deprived of 
their chance of is. a day, by the competitor who does a 
day's work for 9d., to undersell the first bidder and take 
7^d. In such cases as we are supposing, the hypothetical 

x 



322 



NATURAL LAW. 



6 s. a week need not represent any reduction in the current 
scale of wages ; it may be only the result of " slackness * 
of demand, or such a scarcity of work as will only keep 
the labourers employed for half or a quarter of their time. 
If this is the fact, it may often suit the employer's in- 
terest to keep a few hands in full employ, and turn off the 
rest ; and then the union again interferes with the course 
of individual competition by causing those workmen who 
are in full employment to subscribe to secure a bare main- 
tenance for their possible rivals, lest the latter be driven 
to the kind of competition already referred to, the begin- 
ning of the operative's race to ruin ; and this is regarded 
as being nearly as grave an economical heresy as the modi- 
fied Malthusianism above noticed, for the ideal theory of 
bargaining imagines all members of the same class to be 
rivals, whose hostility lays them open to exploitation by 
the members of other classes, to the greater glory of the 
principle of self-interest. 

To put these rival views in their true proportions, we 
have to take a position outside the natural feeling of both 
buyers and sellers. The interest of society at large is to 
have as much efficient and serviceable work done as pos- 
sible, and to have the fruit or reward of the work enjoyed 
by as many members of society as possible. The final 
cause of work is to be of use, not to fetch a price, and 
though, now-a-days, people live mainly by bartering ser- 
vices and commodities, we need not confuse the act with 
the end, or exalt the transactions of commerce above the 
results of civilised life. There must be some confusion 
about the premises of a theory that lands us in antino- 
mies, such as the popular bugbear of over-production, as if 
a country could be impoverished or its wealth diminished 
by its producing too much wealth. A country may pro- 
duce more, in the way of food or manufactures, than it can 
find a lucrative market for outside its own borders ; but 
whatever may be the condition of its foreign trade, a 
country is materially the better off the more abundant all 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 323 



useful and agreeable commodities are within it, and the 
more general and equitable their distribution. Bales of 
calico unsold in the warehouses and barns of grain reserved 
by the farmer are not elements of national wealth while 
the cotton-spinner is half clad and the farm-labourer half 
fed, and yet the more of their respective manufactures the 
industrial population hurls into the market in its distress, 
the less and less their means of acquiring any portion for 
themselves, for the lower the money value or competition 
price set by commerce on the work. 

The mental bewilderment into which we are thrown by 
this apparently suicidal fate of industry disappears if we re- 
member that in practice what is called " over-production," or 
production in excess of the demands of an external market, 
usually extends to all branches of production alike, so that 
if the employers of labour made themselves the channel of 
communication between the different classes of producers, 
the home trade of an industrious population might maintain 
itself without any very elaborate methods of exchange. Any 
increased economy of production that enables a commodity 
to be supplied more abundantly than before may lower the 
price of that commodity as compared with others, but the 
positive value of these others, or of the circulating medium, 
is increased when this purchasing power, in that one direc- 
tion, is enlarged ; for while the positive value of things is 
not increased by making them scarce, the positive value of 
life is raised by whatever tends to make the goods of life 
plentiful and accessible to alL 

The real difficulty is concerned not with production, but 
with distribution. As wealth multiplies, society has to 
determine whether the increase is to go to him that hath 
that he shall have more abundantly, whatever the present 
value of his services, or whether the " unearned increment'' 
of social inheritance is to be enjoyed under conditions. 
Our civilisation rests upon an inheritance of accumulated 
materials, tools, traditions, and commodities, the fruit of 
past industry and saving ; but it is not quite certain that 



324 



NATURAL LAW. 



the self-denial now involved in a rich man's living on his 
income instead of on his capital can be regarded exactly 
as an act of merit for which society owes him material 
reward. Wealth increased through the able direction of 
labour by the great "captains of industry" belongs to them 
by the same title as to their employees as the fruit of work ; 
but we do not accept as normal or permanent the current 
practice which limits the share of each individual in the 
inheritance of preceding generations to the particular lot 
— of lands, debts, or halfpence — which he receives as his 
portion from the next of kin. The wages fund is limited 
after all to that which the skill and industry of each 
generation can produce out of its capital, and if we are to 
encourage the most useful forms of industry, we must be 
prepared to distribute the rewards of labour in proportion 
to its usefulness. Given a perfectly free circulation of 
natural ability, the incapables of all classes would sink 
gradually and gently to the lowest level, the social "re- 
siduum " would deserve its name, and the problem to make 
existence tolerable for even the residuum would receive 
more careful attention from rulers who felt that their own 
flesh and blood were likely to swell the numbers of the 
class. 

The raison d'Stre of the capitalist in a moral and intelli- 
gent community lies in his use, not in his merits, for 
wealth will be piled up in an industrial age, even though 
no father dreams of enriching his children's children. The 
privilege of dispensing unearned wealth is not a reward 
given to the son for the father's economy, for unless the 
wealth is to be well or wisely dispensed, society owes the 
father no thanks for the hoard withdrawn into private 
hands out of the common fund. The service by which the 
rich man earns the wealth entrusted to him is exactly that 
of distribution. Those engaged in the details of production 
who have no surplus wealth of their own cannot afford 
to render unsaleable services, or services which, by their 
very generality, fail to command a price from individuals. 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 325 



Services rendered to no one in particular, but to all who 
need or accept them, are the best acknowledgment of 
rewards earned by no one in particular and paid no one 
exactly knows how or whence; the rewards are concen- 
trated by chance, and though they might almost as well 
be scattered by chance, so far as any personal desert is 
concerned, yet if society is ever to attain to an orderly 
distribution of functions among men, seeing and owning a 
supreme duty to each other severally and collectively, it 
will certainly have no need to abolish the class of unpaid 
servants of the commonwealth whose mission it is to give 
freely what they have freely received, in accordance with 
other canons of fitness than the quotations of the Stock 
Exchange. Sumptuary laws to prevent the accumulation 
of riches in the hands of a minority will lose their charm 
even for the most doctrinaire socialist if the accumulation 
is only a step towards more orderly and intelligent distri- 
bution ; and though it may seem Utopian to look forward 
to such a result, it is not really contrary to nature, reason, 
or possibility, for the habitual exchange of services and 
commodities to be organised as a means of providing all 
classes with the necessaries of life, those who wish for 
them enough to work for them with the material luxuries 
of life, and those who are able to use and value them with 
its spiritual luxuries and graces ; in a word — to furnish 
wholesome life for all, pleasant life for the energetic or 
the amiable, and life the most varied and intense for those 
whose varied powers and intense resolves spend them- 
selves in perfected subservience to the common good. 

We do not undervalue competition as a spur to industry 
and inventive enterprise ; but the community as a whole 
would be better served if traders, producers, and con- 
sumers agreed to seek their common interest with one 
consent, instead of trusting, with a queerly-placed piety, 
in the beneficent result of the uncompromising commercial 
struggle for existence. If we get on so fast and so har- 
moniously when every man spends, say, three-fourths of 



3-6 



NATURAL LAW. 



his energies on his proper work, and one-fourth in shoving 
his work to the fore at his neighbour's expense, how 
much further and faster should we go if the results of 
the struggle were taken for granted, and services were 
amicably grouped in order of merit without the friction 
of a preliminary trial of strength ? Economists will not 
question 'the prudence of buying social order and felicity 
in the cheapest market, but no true economy in the social 
service can be effected by merely nominal reductions in 
price affecting all services at once, still less by a real 
partial reduction serving only to intensify existing ine- 
qualities. If we measure services against each other, not 
by their competition price in some common standard, 
social progress and profit will consist in the multiplication 
of exchangeable equivalents, so as to make a day's work 
more valuable because it produces more, and a day's wages 
more valuable likewise because it will buy more services 
in return. This, and not the pauperisation of an over- 
productive race, seems to be the natural goal of industrial 
aspiration ; and though it may seem Utopian to dream of 
a land where wealth shall not exclude cheapness, the 
dream seems more in keeping with the logic of com- 
mon sense than the waking realities with which we are 
familiar. 

The general aim of political action and social reforms is, 
we assume, to assure to every one every possible facility 
for living the best life they can, and to continue developing 
the possibilities of every one, so that the realised best may 
be progressive; and under this short name of "best" we 
include the healthy discharge of every natural function — 
efficient action, competent understanding, and satisfied 
affection for each individual. But it is as certain as the 
divinity of truth and holiness, that none of us will live to 
see this perfect state — except in the momentary glimpses 
of some twilight revelation ; and some may regard it as an 
open question whether, in the face of this knowledge, the 
present practical best for living men can be the cultus of 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 



327 



the unattainable. We contend that the "best attainable is 
a step on the road towards the absolutely good, but this is 
one of the cases in which judgments are formed, neither 
by reasoning nor conscious choice, but by the intuition of 
feeling and pre-established affinities of taste. 

The main interest of ethical science lies in its bearing 
on the most intimate personal concerns of individuals. We 
may call it egotism if we please, but this question : How 
am I, I myself, and not another, to live my own life, now, 
to-morrow, and through the fated years to come ? is, and 
inevitably always will be, the most urgent of questions 
to men and women whose first need is to live, and whose 
first desire is to live pleasantly or well. The inexhaustible 
fascination possessed by the problems of morality comes 
from the fact that in them alone man sees his own needs 
in relation to the general facts of existence, and imagines 
it possible to derive from them instruction and direction 
for his own personal course. The cravings after help and 
guidance to which religious systems owe their power can 
find no more rational satisfaction than in the apprehension 
of eternal truth as it affects the life of every man. The 
truth is the same for all, but its practical application is as 
various as individual circumstances ; each individual has 
impulses and aspirations which it is his wish to rationalise 
and bring into harmony with the general rules that he is 
prepared to accept, provided always that the rules can be 
made to apply to his own case. Men may be honestly 
unable to discern what their duty is, but the obscurity 
comes from their defective insight, not from any objective 
uncertainty, and we acknowledge our grasp of a supposed 
truth to be incomplete and feeble, unless we are able to 
verify its power, in the case of any concrete problem, by 
pointing to the postulate or proposition in which the de- 
sired solution is implicitly contained ; and we feel that 
when once a clear and adequate apprehension of the natural 
end and the reasonable means had been attained, the pre- 
sent outlines of our moral convictions might be filled in — 



328 



NATURAL LAW. 



at the indefinite leisure of trie race — as minutely as the 
most scrupulous conscience could desire. 

But the outline is not filled in yet, and consequently the 
intellectual problem, what is best for things in general, is 
complicated by, and helps to complicate, the moral problem, 
what is the best possible for the agent. The best for each 
individual to aim at is the best of which he — and not 
another — has a clear and adequate vision, giving birth to 
desire. It is idle to urge one man towards a vocation that 
he has not the gift to follow, though for a better man the 
choice might be good. The crowning reason for devotion 
to the general rather than the particular good is, that each 
man's best possible self can only live in the best possible 
world ; and we have a right to keep hold of this abstract 
certainty, even when we are unable to trace the connection 
between the two, or even when, as may sometimes occur, 
there is no present personal motive for the conduct that 
we see to be abstractedly best. At rare intervals we are 
overtaken by a ghastly sense that the strength of right 
motives is not irresistible, and we feel for the godless world 
in which our lot is cast something of the horror that has 
been felt for the atheist's creed ; but though the painful 
impression is not to be forgotten, rational faith can survive 
this momentary shock in the strength of two considera- 
tions: first, that the pain of the shock comes from its 
rarity, whence it follows that, as a rule, the powers of light 
are in the ascendant ; and, secondly, that the divine is not 
lost, even in the darkest moments, when there is a human 
soul ready to revile the world for having nothing more 
divine to show it than its own unbought appetite after the 
truly right. And though it is not possible to determine 
a priori what contribution each individual is to make to 
the general wellbeing of the social group, we have gene- 
rally an image of the most admirable character existing 
parallel to our conception of the general best, and the 
nature of the character that is cultivated, together with 
that of the ideal that is proposed, define between them 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 329 



the special course to be adopted by individuals under 
whatever circumstances may arise in practice. 

Society has a right to control the conduct of its mem- 
bers, and the habitual conduct reacts upon the character, 
though the conduct is the result of the original nature as 
well as of the controlling circumstances. What we call 
the " formed character " is, in fact, the second nature be- 
gotten by social conditions out of the first, in which capa- 
bilities reappear as ability, or, to borrow the more exact 
German idiom, in which Fdhigheiten are transformed into 
Feriigkeiten ; and the course of life, on which it becomes 
possible to pass judgment, is the virtually spontaneous 
fruit of the second nature. Very few talents are abso- 
lutely irresistible, and nearly every choice power that 
ripens into choice performance has been deliberately 
cherished and developed by careful nourishment and ex- 
ercise. And, at the same time, it may be noted that 
nearly all the possessors of exceptional power in any one 
special direction also possess more than the average of 
miscellaneous ability, so that it really lies within their 
own power to elect their own social role. But if such a 
special ability is once allowed to enter on the course of 
production, the impetus becomes uncontrollable, and the 
future of the whole man becomes immediately dependent 
on the fortunes of his genius. And in processes that are 
partly deliberate and partly the necessary consequences 
of voluntary acts, the moment to which responsibility 
attaches is that of self-committal to a line which, once 
taken, can never be altogether abandoned. 

The born painter cannot but draw, the born musician 
cannot but compose, the born mechanic invents, the born 
mathematician works problems ; but men of genius, at 
least, have a choice between the role of artist and of 
amateur, and it is a question open for discussion whether 
they are morally bound to prefer the former. The object 
in view is to attain the maximum specialisation of active 
ability without narrowing the range of personal conscious- 



33° 



NATURAL LAW. 



ness. We have no sense of incompleteness in the life of 
Socrates or Spinoza, or of Sir James Brooke or Garibaldi, 
because the discharge of the predestined function seems 
to include a provision for all the personal impulses and 
moral inclinations. On the other hand, in the case of 
such men as G-oethe or Humboldt, we have an almost 
oppressive sense of personal completeness, mixed with a 
vague impression of something wanting, as if their very 
completeness isolated them from complete contact on any 
one side with the ordinary world ; and to measure their 
objective eminence we have to regard Humboldt as the 
successful explorer and geognostic, and Goethe as the 
friend of Schiller and the author of " Faust," or both as 
types and models of the possible range of human accom- 
plishment — sinking the relations in which they could 
effect no more than ordinary men, or even less than ordi- 
nary men with narrower faculties but more intense power 
of self-abandonment to the exercise of faculty. 

Apart from such exceptional cases as that of universal 
genius, or of a talent as minutely defined as that of a 
grammarian or a decipherer of hieroglyphics, human apti- 
tudes class themselves generally in the same lines as the 
various leading objects of ambition and aspiration. A 
special susceptibility to one form or another of natural 
good inspires the work of a Mozart, a Newton, a Titian, 
or a Keats; and hardly less special, in its way, is the 
vocation to seek not this good or that, but every possible 
good for all the world ; or since that ambition is really 
too high for human powers, to seek every possible means 
for facilitating the life and development of all possible 
good. And for those who understand by morality the 
conscientious pursuit of the rationally chosen Best, it is 
an interesting practical question whether the philanthro- 
pist's life is essentially better than that of other spe- 
cialists, and whether every form of natural good ought U 
(i.e., had better) be cultivated in conscious subordination 
to a more comprehensive ideal, or whether, to realise the 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 331 



most comprehensive ideal possible, we require the maxi- 
mum of self-assertion in every special normal tendency ? 
The case might be stated in this way : are all normal pur- 
suits good in themselves, or only good for the sake of the 
abstract goodness made up by their combination? Or 
again : is it a higher function to organise and arrange the 
contributions of natural force than to contribute fresh 
force to the development of social life ? 

To this it may be replied, that natural morality con- 
ceives every special form of natural good as indispensable 
to the whole result of perfection, and that there are not 
degrees of indispensableness, and, generally speaking, we 
have no moral ground for exalting one form of natural 
good, one phase of social service, above another, or one 
above all the rest. It is only when the imperfections of 
our actual systems, social, religious, and political, obtrude 
on our consciousness, that we feel as if the one thing need- 
ful to all of us were right guidance towards a better state, 
and that the best leaders of men are those who can supply 
this, our chief and most urgent want. We are not blind 
to the sublimity of mathematical truth, or callous to the 
emotions vibrating in the voice of poetic passion, only 
while men and women are starving round us in brutal 
misery, or battening in brutal ease, the problem and the 
poem seem far away from half our life, and we become 
unwilling accomplices in the indifference of our age to 
some of the noblest works of man. We are called away 
from the peaceful life of intellectual perception, and many 
of us are fain to turn reformers in despair, not because 
we have the reformer's talent or the reformer's taste, but 
because the world needs so much reform that it has failed 
to give us any narrower task more in keeping with our 
modest powers and private inclinations. 

Still there is a distinction, of which we may as well 
recognise the full significance, between action which has 
its motive in the agent's personal impulse to do that act 
rather than another, and action which has its motive in 



332 



NATURAL LAW. 



the agent's desire that such a thing be done, whatever the 
doing may cost him, and however little personal concern 
he may have in the result accomplished. For the reason 
just suggested, we are more ready to give the name of 
moral effort to the latter class of doing ; but at the same 
time we may admit that, in an ideal state of things, with 
the social mechanism duly adjusted, and only needing to 
be kept in repair, the distinction would disappear, and the 
professional curators of the machine, finding their task no 
harder or more painful than that of other craftsmen, would 
cease to receive additional regard, or perhaps rather, the 
class would disappear altogether, like armies from a 
Quaker continent, when every special form of energy 
had learnt to exercise itself in conscious subjection to 
the claims of other forms, and in conscious devotion to 
the best general result. 

We are inconsistent because the world is inconsistent, 
and at one moment cry out for the help of moral virtue 
and disinterested self-sacrifice, while at the next we grow 
impatient of the imperfection that makes the sacrifices 
needed, and we challenge the saints to complete their 
work by giving us a world where there shall be no place 
for saintliness. It is not absolutely good that the best men 
and the best deeds should be swallowed up in the painful 
resistance of evil ; only now, and as far in front as we can 
see, there is evil enough to occupy whole armies of re- 
formers, though we may dream if we please of a millenium 
when the armies shall disband because all the world has 
joined them, and the reformers find their occupation gone 
because at last every man has found a work to do and has 
learnt to do it faithfully. And, partly for the sake of that 
distant day, it behoves us not to lose sight of the fact that 
natural good is older than human crime or folly, and may 
be young yet when many of our virtues, like many of our 
pleasures, are shelved in the museum of unconsciousness. 

There is something abnormal in a life all spent in 
pleasureless resistance to what is. To do good by whole- 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 333 



sale is the hardest of arts ; it requires a talent that is rare, 
and only those who possess it feel bound in conscience to 
the self-denial required for its exercise. But it is inaccu- 
rate to say that a perfectly virtuous man likes (or ought to 
like) doing good to his unfortunate fellow-mortals, or that 
he does what is right because he finds it pleasant, and 
that it is a part of virtue to like doing whatever it is best 
to do ; because to like a thing, to find it pleasant, is to 
accept its existence as a whole unreservedly, to have no 
fault to find with it ; and no one has this feeling in right- 
ing a wrong, at least no clear-headed person who would 
unfeignedly rather not have had it to right. There may 
be a transient satisfaction when the remedy applied is 
found complete and effectual, but with the true philan- 
thropist this half personal feeling is almost merged in 
sympathy with the relief of those who are benefited, and 
promptly superseded by compassion for those still unsuc- 
coured. It is not so easy as it looks to add to the happi- 
ness of mankind ; good-will goes but a little way, and the 
modern stoic has no sooner accommodated himself with 
resignation to his own share of the objective ills of life, 
than the harder, or at least more interminable task con- 
fronts him of acquiescing in all the present irremediable 
suffering of others. He is the servant of the servants of 
men, and his task is to guide and harmonise the action 
of all who work without thinking for all who enjoy with- 
out thinking; to teach them how to compass the ends 
they desire when they have not learnt to will the means 
that lead to them. Even in the work of reform there can 
be no self-assertion, for the world, as it is, is made and 
animated by wills that it is the altruist's endeavour to 
enlighten and content, not to alter by constraint : there is 
much suffering in the world, and the reason of the suffering 
of those who suffer remediably is that they do not at this 
present moment will the first step towards the improve- 
ment of their condition. There is no one so badly off 
that perfect wisdom would not mend his case, but with 



334 



NATURAL LAW. 



the best will in the world, perfect wisdom cannot be 
imparted wholesale, only by degrees and as the patient is 
able to bear it ; people cannot be helped to their own good 
by force, and it is only when good-will is wanting, when 
men are content that others should suffer for their profit, 
or at least by their connivance, that altruism becomes for 
the moment militant, but it has no satisfaction in the fray, 
for cruelty is the summwm malum, an absolute evil, the 
perception of which is unmitigatedly painful, even though 
we do not suppose all who have the misfortune to be 
criminal to be condemned to an eternity of remorse. 

Certainly no one is virtuous for amusement ; but if the 
altruists' concern for the misfortunes of others prevents 
their life from being happier than the egotists', it is also 
certain that they would not consent to wish away the 
power of sympathy, which, though a source of suffering to 
themselves, is the condition of their practical usefulness. 
They must endure the consciousness of evil, moral and 
material, as a step toward amending it, just as a man 
must be tormented with ambitious desires before he can 
imagine happiness to consist in moulding other men to 
his will. The few fine souls called to this tragic fate do 
not ask or need our pity ; the vocation is irresistible ; and 
as experience abundantly proves that society does not 
subsist by a series of equitable exchanges, it is to the 
superogatory virtue of these lovers of their kind that the 
human race must look for its redemption from the curse 
of natural imperfection. Certainly exchanges should be 
equitable, and objective rights may be maintained by law; 
but the moral, the religious attitude of mind, recognises 
only duties, and those in whom it is most perfect argue, 
with sweet unreasonableness, that the less the past and 
the present have done for them, the more must they needs 
do for the present and the future. We poor sinners, who 
are far from that holy state, can at least almost understand 
why the will of those who can lead such a life is good to do 
it, and how a peace which passeth understanding follows 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 335 



from the perfect unity of will and deed only attainable by 
those who have known and conquered every human pain, 
and turned their knowledge and their victory into a force 
working for the good of all mankind. 

We are not all born saints, and the counsels of perfect 
self-devotion must be left for those who can receive them ; 
but in a world of saints there would be no room for that 
saintly grace, and in the world that now is there are many 
whose natural appetites make no damaging or unreason- 
able demands upon their fellows. The arts and sciences 
are naturally good and morally innocent, and we can more 
easily imagine a society got beyond the need for reform 
than one able to dispense with the cultus of truth and 
beauty. The chief moral good is perhaps to have learnt 
from nature to know, and feel, and desire the truth and 
beauty of the world that might be, but it is something to 
possess the best of that which is, to perceive and represent 
even if we cannot create. We have an impersonal ideal of 
beauty and truth, which we venerate as something outside 
ourselves, and a life spent in such worship has an ideal 
end, though that end is not the happiness of other sentient 
beings. Artists and men of science are the high-priests of 
this worship, and it is for them to throw open its temples 
to the many ; but no true worshipper believes himself to 
be the final cause of his God; if such a connexion is 
dreamt of at all, it must lie the other way, and we count 
men to be of worth as they struggle into an apprehension 
of the divine. 

The difference between this conception and the view of 
art as ministering to enjoyment, and of culture as serving 
only to quicken and stimulate the taste, is, that, in the one 
case, the man aspires to master his inspiration, to possess 
the vision, to enjoy the revelation, in a word, to subordi- 
nate art to the artist ; and that, in the other, the whole 
consciousness is abandoned to the impression that is given, 
desire is swallowed up in disinterested apprehension, even 
the will is suspended, and the personal exercise of a faculty 



33^ 



NATURAL LAW. 



by which the vision is embodied and the revelation de- 
clared, seems only present to trie individual as an act of 
more complete self-identification with the influences that 
are his inspiration. This is doubtless what is meant by 
the often-repeated phrase that all true art must be re- 
ligious, which sounds like a paradox when religion is 
confounded with belief in the established theology of the 
age. During the last three hundred years there have been 
painters who were good Christians enough, but no sacred 
picture has been produced to compare for devout religious 
insight into the glories of natural form with the turn of a 
horse's head in the Elgin Marbles, carved by men who, 
whether they believed in the divine lineage of Athene and 
said their prayers to Poseidon or not, had seen in then 
own Attica blue skies, grey olive boughs, curling waves, 
and prancing war-horses, and had absorbed all the lessons 
of divine truth lurking in such sights for the sons of men. 
It is hard to formulate all the difference between the true 
artist and the mechanician, but perhaps it lies chiefly in 
the refinement of spiritual candour that is able to receive 
general intellectual, as well as merely sensible impressions 
from external forms : if Turner was a true painter, it was 
because he knew how to paraphrase sight in shapes and 
colours that are emotional. 

But to see, or to feel what is seen, is not everything. 
To make a fine art of passion or attachment to the beauti- 
ful in nature, art, or human life requires the abandonment 
of all the faculties, and is so absorbing as to leave the 
mind no leisure for other claims; pleasurable emotions, 
however rich and variously modulated, do not occupy the 
whole of man, and life becomes one-sided if exclusive im- 
portance is attributed to their cultivation. Of course, any 
one with a rooted habit of referring every point of conduct 
to a supposed external rule of right will say, Why should 
we not, if it pleases us, take the part, the side of life that 
we like best, and let the remainder go ? But if it is ad- 
mitted that there can be no reason for anything except the 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 337 



nature of things and of men, it is a simple answer that the 
whole is larger than its parts, and that, even if we believe 
ourselves to be naturally one-sided, we may acknowledge 
the quality to be a defect, though the acknowledgment 
might prove our nature less one-sided than we thought. 
If the object is to make life rich and full, each individual 
must have wealth and variety in himself, not merely by 
contrast to a too monotonous level in the men around him ; 
it is a parasitic originality that only becomes conscious of 
itself in opposition, for it takes little wisdom to differ from 
a fool, while much learning is needed to agree with some 
of the wise. The truest intuitions are detached, and though 
the creations of art are immortal, and each moment of 
(esthetic consciousness complete in itself, they add nothing 
to each other, they do not weave themselves into a con- 
tinuous, progressive, organic whole. 

Emotions spend themselves and leave a fading memory, 
but all true knowledge, which is the perception of constant 
relations and necessary fact, hangs together, as the world 
does, so that none of it can quite cease out of being. The 
enjoyment that comes to us from without is ours for a 
moment and ends; the force that we expend is ours and 
remains, but only on condition that we give away its fruits ; 
but knowledge both lasts and grows and stays with us ; we 
possess it even to that last refinement upon the rights of 
property, it is ours to bequeath ; of all our best spiritual 
treasures, that alone can be left behind us unimpaired. Our 
happiness dies with us, or rather, it dies daily, if it is born 
so often ; our actions live in their fruit, which might set 
our teeth on edge if we lived to taste it ; only the truths 
we knew, the scraps of scientific certitude which we rescued 
from the dark abysses of unknown existence, are altogether 
ours, with a possession the more absolute that it can be 
shared, ours and our children's after us, as long as we and 
they live in a world more constant than man. It is an old 
complaint against Providence that virtue is monotonous, 
that there are many ways of sinning, and that men are 

X 



333 



NATURAL LAW. 



fond of novelty ; but science at least is as various as vice, 
and if we consider that knowledge grows by being shared, 
that the interest of all who seek knowledge is one, that the 
end which many conspire to seek will be reached in part, 
and that to reach a desired end is pleasant, and chiefly that 
the pleasure of success in a pursuit only disappoints us 
when we fail to gratify the one desire that is stronger — for 
a sympathy to multiply the pleasure to infinity — then 
without any unphilosophical optimism it may perhaps be 
hoped that even if the world were peopled, as we hardly 
think it ever will be, exclusively with scientific atheists, 
a considerable proportion of them might still find it pos- 
sible to rise above the resignation to their earthly condi- 
tion which is enjoined by morality to the contentment 
which is a counsel of religious perfection. 

But although a special interest attaches to the problems 
of morality, in consequence of their bearing on the con- 
cerns of human life and the responsibilities of choice, this 
very fact lends a degree of embarrassment to their discus- 
sion, and tempts us to rank them amongst matters of too 
deep and intimate concern for it to be exactly decorous 
to speak freely of them in public. The feeling may be 
called either spiritual modesty or mauvaise honte as we 
please, but there certainly is a general disposition to feel 
that conscience is a thing about which the less said the 
better in civilised society : certain forms of ignorance or 
vice are spontaneously condemned as radically unattrac- 
tive and in bad taste, but the worst taste of all is to plead 
guilty to the inheritance of a worse and a better nature, 
with the attendant doom of struggle, failure, and aspira- 
tion. We are impatient of many of the coarser necessities 
of our being, and since the religious formula has ceased to 
be generally received, popular philosophy has given no 
reason why men should be cursed with a divided will, and 
they try to hide the infirmity as they would hide an here- 
ditary malformation of body. And it is in this way only 
that the relaxation of religious faith can fairly be said to 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 339 



threaten the foundations of morality ; for men who have 
strength and rectitude enough to make a sacrifice of incli- 
nation which their judgment enjoins, will follow inclina- 
tion on the easier road if their judgment speaks only to 
condemn the feebleness of a divided purpose. Since we 
have ceased to lay the blame of our own shortcomings on 
the devil, our self-respect impels us rather to profess that 
we don't care about being any better than we are, than to 
resolve against continuing so much worse than in our 
secret hearts we should like to be. 

Closely connected with this mixture of pride and cow- 
ardice, which paralyses more human effort than we perhaps 
suspect, is an intellectual fastidiousness that forbids the 
mind to supplement the irresolution of the will. We are 
on our guard against " the solemn folly of taking ourselves 
too seriously;" and because we have critical acumen 
enough to know that the most fortunate result of our best 
efforts will be objectively insignificant, we try despairingly 
to escape from the limitations of incompetence by the self- 
imposed limitation — of indolence — which, unluckily for 
our sagacity, turns out, of course, to be objectively narrower 
even than the one by which we scorned to be confined. And 
yet there is a ground of reasonableness in our dread of 
overstrained pretensions and moral priggishness. If we 
are in the habit of feeling as strongly as we can feel about 
small interests, without noting their comparative smallness, 
it becomes easy to infer circuitously that they cannot be 
so small after all, since they excite the same feelings as 
objects of unimpeachable grandeur, which is as false as the 
first impressions of Cheselden's patient, that all objects 
were the size they appeared on the plane of vision. 

The ironical modesty of the present day is, in part at 
least, a reaction from the rather boisterous insistence of 
the "broad" or "muscular" school of twenty or thirty 
years ago, on the doctrine that " life is real, life is earnest," 
and earnest souls a commodity over which heaven and 
earth can hardly make too much ado. And it might even 



34o 



NATURAL LAW. 



be said that the critics, who make no moral effort at all, 
because they think the best efforts in their power would 
fall disgustingly short of the sublime, may yet retain a 
clearer sense of what constitutes moral sublimity than 
worthy and conscientious people whose vision of the ideal 
is obscured by too near and absorbing contemplation of the 
duty of the moment. Of course there is no necessary 
connection between fastidiousness and inertia, or between 
good intentions and a defective sense of moral proportion, 
but this happens to be the present relation between the 
defects and qualities of actually opposing schools, and to 
each school the defect of the other is in a way a sign of 
the quality most needed by itself. A degree of ease and 
spontaneity in well-doing is fairly included in our ideal of 
character, and what we object to as priggishness is not 
really overweening ambition or exaggerated idealism, but 
in practice always some real fault of taste or obtuseness 
to the effects of mental perspective — invoking motives 
on too large a scale in proportion to the end proposed, 
or magnifying the end to correspond to the — subjective 
■^-magnitude of the considerations which led to its pro- 
posal. It is the duty of the poorest creatures amongst 
us, no less than of saints and heroes, to strive after the 
realisation of their own best self, but we object instinc- 
tively to a confusion of the tone proper to struggles in 
which the interests of humanity are concerned with that 
appropriated to merely private vicissitudes. Ingenuous 
boys and intelligent girls by the half million may think 
quite as much and as conscientiously about the duty of 
self-culture and the ways and means of self-development 
as Goethe, but outside sympathy with their mental history 
will be proportioned, not to the depth and sincerity of their 
feeling, but to the value of the objective result. 

Nor is this all : we have a right to demand, as a part of 
the many-sided ideal of human culture, that though the 
will continues rigidly faithful to the line of action accepted 
as the best possible, it shall do so without prejudice to the 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 341 



right and duty of the mind to prefer a conceivable better. 
As in the Platonic allegory, the steeds and the charioteer 
are both included in the same spiritual being, and the 
steeds have to bear the lash and goad of their own better 
half; while, on the other hand, the charioteer must have 
steeds and a roadway — a will to guide subject to real con- 
ditions — or there is no entering upon the aiena at all. The 
triumph of spiritual discipline is to keep the relation 
between the soul and the ideal unalterably close through 
all the varied functions of life, of which perhaps a material 
majority have by rights no conscious bearing on the ideal. 
As a matter of judgment, we admire those persons who 
keep a firm and constant hold on the duties that are 
accepted, but, as a matter of taste, we require the hold to 
be light and flexible, for even our judgment rejects the 
idea of a wooden fixity about the human copy of the 
illimitable divine idea. It is one of the points of sympathy 
between art and religion that both are haunted by an 
impression that " the fashion of this world passeth away," 
and that, therefore, the becoming temper for man — who 
passes away still more surely and swiftly — is in all things 
to live as one not bound to the life he leads, to " weep as 
though he wept not, to rejoice as though he rejoiced not, to 
buy as though he possessed not ; " but this " detachment," 
which is carried by asceticism so far as to bid those who live 
be as though they lived not, branches off also into a kind 
of secular antinomianism which it is curious to compare 
with the more orthodox sentiment. The life of unrestrained 
passion shares with the life of absolute self-repression an 
impatience, which natural morality is obliged to condemn, 
of the real conditions of human existence. The attempt 
to avoid sin by avoiding action, and pain by crushing sen- 
sibility, is near akin to the attempt to avoid failure by 
abstaining from effort, and self-denial by abstaining from 
moral relations. And just as Christians and Buddhists 
have sought to renounce all bondage to the objective 
world, the ideal of aesthetic lawlessness requires its votaries 



342 



NATURAL LAW. 



to refuse obedience to the subjective constraint of con- 
science or principle. 

One theoretical attraction of the " Vie de Boheme " is 
that just because it is not approved by the reason, criticism 
and enjoyment of it are more absolutely free, that is to 
say, the enjoyment is tempered by self-criticism, and the 
criticism is not exposed to mortification by practical tests. 
Like sectarian religions, its popularity depends on the 
supposed antagonism of an unenlightened world; hence 
a comfortable sense of latent rationalism and potential 
superiority is fostered in the minds of those who seem 
bent on travestying the work of conscience by their almost 
comic efforts not to fall by accident into the practice of 
any of the prosaic virtues that might frequently be of 
use in their case. The situation lends itself to epigram, 
and to carry off its inconsistency, the professional child of 
impulse exhausts himself in ironical contempt for the state 
of things in which he is entangled. But satire becomes 
wearisome at last, when the satirist is always his own 
butt, and the listener learns to distrust the reality of 
impulses that give themselves up to ridicule so easily, or 
the sincerity of the ridicule poured on impulses that have 
so little self-assertion, and yet are allowed to rule. It 
is impossible for those who abandon themselves to the 
habitual performance of " actions of a class " — good or bad 
— to regard all actions with the disengaged indifference of 
the critic, who makes a rule of universal abstention, and 
in spite of his more or less witty protestations that the 
world's work is vanity and its pleasures vexation, the 
votary of pleasure, as of any other kind of toil, finds 
himself at last acting — with the regular constancy of a 
Philistine— as if he believed that his own special form 
of vanity and vexation were the only one to be desired 
or endured. Only a few, of the more intellectual sort of 
libertine, attain to a quasi religious detachment and do 
really solve the problem of desiring as not desiring, enjoy- 
ing as not enjoying, and, in fact, starting from a scruple of 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 343 



taste or understanding, end by emancipating themselves 
from the thraldom of passion as completely as other men 
do at the call of prudence or moral sympathies. Christi- 
anity in its prime was prompt to welcome such repentant 
sinners, who had learnt in the world the asceticism they 
came to practise in the cloister when their last personal 
illusion had given way; and it is perhaps a sectarian 
prejudice that leads moral philosophers of the present day 
to look askance at such allies. All roads lead to Eome, 
and the cultivation of every normal faculty to conclusions 
in harmony with human nature and human fate. But to 
make the adoption of the true scientific faith easy to these 
devotees of carnal perfection, and for the sake of those 
natural truths to which they remain faithful through all 
their indolent fallacies, it is especially necessary for the 
morality of the future to be on its guard against aesthetic 
stupidity and intellectual exaggeration, as well as against 
moral blemishes of a deeper dye. The Encyclopedist's 
charge against Eobespierre — " Avec ton Etre Supreme 
tu commences a m'embeter " — would be really damaging 
to the votaries of natural perfection, because their cultus is 
self-contradictory, i.e., naturally imperfect, if it is preached 
with an insistence that becomes tiresome. The object of 
their worship is infinite, but human powers of adoration 
are limited, and it is not a religious duty to chafe against 
immovable restraints, but, on the contrary, to submit to 
them freely, so that no natural force may be wasted by a 
gratuitous collision with their reality. If the reverential 
impulse is intermittent, that too is the work of nature, 
and man may not be wise above what is given him. 

We come back, then, to our starting-point, that no 
rational rule of life is to be found for individuals out of re- 
lation to their real place in a faulty but improvable society. 
At the same time, we cannot agree with those moralists 
who deny the existence of self-regarding duties, because the 
greater part of our obligations are to society and owe their 
recognition to the force of social feelings. It is true that 



344 



NATURAL LAW. 



the opposition between duty and interest is, in their case, 
less apparent, for self-interest, rightly understood, means 
good, and self-regarding good is never painful in its results 
(as a personal contribution towards social good may be), 
but it is often difficult in performance, so as to be attended 
with the same inward sense of constraint and moral pres- 
sure as other duties. Indeed there are some characters 
who seem to own no obligation except to their own opinion, 
and find the decisive motive for self-devoted action rather 
in the impulse to be what they think right themselves 
than to do what they imagine to be beneficial to others. 
But this distinction is only psychological; there is no 
objective antagonism between the claims of personal per- 
fection and social duty, because the rejection of a real and 
valid external claim is one of those misdeeds which injure 
the character, even though it may be a misfortune to the 
character that the claim should exist. But under any 
conceivable circumstances one course of conduct will be 
the most right, and the course which is right from one 
point of view is right from all. We can imagine, say, a 
politician or a writer of genius compelled to choose between 
the duty of providing for his family and the duty of giving 
his best — and least saleable — work to the world ; noblesse 
oblige, and the great man owes himself to the larger claim ; 
but if he does the best he can for his own household, he 
does it no wrong, even though he may have sons or 
daughters for whom the best life would have been one 
of ease and luxury. No man is bound to impossibili- 
ties, and the sacrifices that are imposed by circumstances 
cannot be laid to the charge of individual consciences. 
But according to the strict unbending rule of perfect 
morals, the only personal sacrifices that men have always 
a moral right to refuse are those which would detract 
from their efficiency as a social instrument, or foster im- 
perfection in the person for whom the sacrifice is to be 
made. The loyalty of chivalrous nobles to a bad king, 
of faithful servants to selfish masters, of good women to 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 345 



"brutal men, are examples of the latter kind ; for though 
devotion rising to the most complete self-sacrifice is a good 
and beautiful thing if the cause or the person is worthy, if 
they are not worthy, the devotion may be even worse than 
thrown away. The devotion of the good to the bad may, 
really or apparently, serve to make the best of things for 
the moment, but even so the sacrifice is only morally, not 
naturally or aesthetically, beautiful ; and if we look beyond 
the special case to its place in the general stream of ten- 
dency, we see that its only final justification must lie in 
the conversion of its recipient to a temper less exacting of 
sacrifice. Even then it would have been better if the 
occasion for the first self-devotion had not arisen, for the 
same amount of virtue, instead of neutralising vice or 
maleficent weakness, would have been left available for 
the positive service of mankind against unavoidable im- 
personal evils. 

The very extension which we are prepared to give to the 
range of social claims makes it the more necessary to insist 
on the fact that " otherness " or " not-selfishness " by itself 
does not make a claim valid, any more than egotism or self- 
regardingness by itself makes a desire wrong. No moral 
problem is harder than that of holding the balance even 
between the just claim of the self and its surroundings ; 
and as there is something radically unamiable in juridical 
quibbling about personal rights in moral relations, we feel 
the more need of cultivated and responsive consciences, 
whose intuitions may sum up at once the tacit pleadings 
on both sides, and carry conviction with their verdict, un- 
embittered by dispute. But it is neither natural nor 
healthy to conceive the welfare of society as depending, 
like the stability of a child's house of cards, upon the 
mutual support given to each other by units who have no 
power of standing erect by themselves. Ends that a man 
does not value enough to seek for his own sake will not 
seem better worth seeking for the sake of some one else, 
and ends that he feels to be worth attaining will be sought 



346 



NATURAL LAW. 



on their own merits, and not because others may share his 
opinion of their desirability. 

The self-regarding duty of cultivating all the natural 
powers and sensibilities cannot be derived from the social 
duty of exercising all the acquired ability in conscious de- 
ference to the coequal rights and duties of other members 
of the community ; but we are certainly bound to consider 
the relation between the two ideals of natural morality, the 
personal completeness of the individual, and his complete 
adaptation to the discharge of given social functions. In 
the present state of things, specialisation of function may 
seem more valuable than versatility of power, because the 
greater part of the life of individuals is taken up with 
various social relations ; they cannot aim merely at being 
good specimens of their kind, or rather, it becomes a part 
of specific excellence to fulfil the demands of given rela- 
tions with ideal completeness, even if, in so doing, some 
possibilities of personal accomplishment remain unrealised. 
For the individual it is not an end to act, or to feel, or to 
know ; the inner life craves breadth, while the outer action 
gains in force by circumscription, and the ideal combina- 
tion — or compromise — is to feel and understand in the 
midst of serviceable action, or to act and feel sanely while 
making a business of rational apprehension. 

There can hardly be a more dangerous mistake made 
in good faith than that of assuming that the division of 
labour, which is socially convenient, must be mimicked by 
a subdivision or scattering of mental and moral qualities 
among different individuals or classes, restricting intelli- 
gence to an aristocracy of birth or wealth, making industry 
the prerogative of a proletariate, sensibility the speciality 
of women, and full human life the affair of no one, except 
perhaps a few doctrinaire Hedonists. This is one of the 
weakest points of the positivist ideal, which, even if in 
itself desirable, is too much at variance with psychological 
possibilities to be thought of as attainable. Just as in 
society the complete and highest development of every 



SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL PERFECTION. 347 



class presupposes equal proportionate development of the 
others, so in individuals it is impossible to separate the 
healthy growth of energy, affection, and intelligence, since 
feeling is the echo of action, and thought the summary of 
feeling. The seclusion of a class, a sex, or a profession 
from all active interests, that it may devote itself without 
distraction to the cultivation of the emotions, would defeat 
its own purpose, for the emotions must have de quoi vivre, 
they cannot stir without stimulus in an artificial vacuum, 
and their natural food is drawn from the conditions under 
which personal impulses and desires assert their instinctive 
vitality. It is not necessary to force the character into a 
narrow and mechanical formalism ; passions controlled but 
not repressed may be trusted to break out with all desir- 
able strength when the fitting occasion offers itself, unless 
such occasions are deliberately shunned ; and passion for 
its own sake, indulged coute qui coute under the least ideal 
conditions, is not a product to be seriously desired or cul- 
tivated upon principle. And though action and passion 
seem to culminate in the perceptions of reason, we cannot 
make even rationality stand for the whole of manly excel- 
lence. The reason is the last word of the achieved ; but 
the man who is all reason has done his do, there is no fur- 
ther spring of original power in his soul, he has come to 
the end of himself and his possibilities, and is but, as it 
were, a register or commentary on the outer world, a 
knowing machine, adding nothing to the sum of being. 
Hence we cannot take the " man of science " for the ideal 
hero of the future, nor find the key to our difficulties in 
the spread of devotion to positive knowledge. We are 
little the better for knowing about things not worth doing 
or experiencing ; and that which is still being done or felt 
is a contribution to the stores of consciousness, which may 
be digested by and bye into new forms of doctrine, such as 
present knowledge is unable to forestall, and yet cannot 
afford to exclude. Human beings contribute to society 
such material services as they can, and receive in return 



348 



NATURAL LAW. 



the suggestive impressions without which further action 
would be unmotived, and continued life a blank. And 
the condition of the harmony between man and nature, of 
which the moral law is the formula, is only the existence 
of such a real congruity between the inner and the outer 
tendency as makes the human best compatible with the 
mixed realities of the world which is not human, and still 
less divine. 



VIII. 



CONCLUSIONS. 



" And I turned myself to behold wisdom, and madness, and folly : for 
what can the man do that cometh after the king ? even that which hath 
been already done. 

" Then I saw that wisdom excelleth folly, as far as light excelleth. dark- 
ness."— Ecclesiastes. 

" I am no optimist whose faith must hang 
On hard pretence that pain is beautiful, 
And agony explained for men at ease 
By virtue's exercise in pitying it. 
But this I hold ; that he who takes one gift 
Made for him by the hopeful work of man, 
"Who tastes sweet bread, walks where he will unarmed, 
His shield and warrant the invisible law, 
Who owns a hearth and household charities, 
"Who clothes his body and his sentient soul 
With skill and thoughts of men, and yet denies 
A human good worth toiling for, is cursed 
With worse negation than the poet feigned 
In Mephistopheles. — The Devil spins 
His wire-drawn argument against all good 
With sense of brimstone as his private lot, 
And never drew a solace from the earth," 

— George Eliot. 



/ 



If science is an art of naming, every name is a generalisation, and to call 
Nature names implies a reference to more than one experience, however 
real, intimate, and infelicitous ; the appropriate name will characterise the 
universal experience, which is mixed. 



VIII. 



CONCL USIONS. 

It is a common mistake, bom of the close and normal 
connection between thought and feeling, to suppose that 
every one who takes the trouble to state a proposition 
must be personally attached to the facts he formulates. 
Yet we may apprehend a truth without being in love 
with it, and we may be in love with truth without being 
in love with all the facts which we learn to know for true. 

If the outline of belief sketched in the preceding pages 
is approximately in accordance with facts, it is of little 
moment whether writer or reader is glad or sorry that the 
facts are thus, and not otherwise. We have endeavoured 
to reproduce faithfully the best and the worst of the truth 
as it is, leaving — as it must be left — to personal moods 
and feelings to pronounce sentence of love or aversion for 
the final result. On the whole, we believe broad possi- 
bilities of good to stretch beyond the narrow certainties of 
private ill ; but it is a question for each man's conscience, 
judgment, or taste, whether the one is a sufficient compen- 
sation or atonement for the other. 

The best we can say is, that the world does not appear 
to be under the government of a bad God. The natural 
laws which the mind recognises as irresistible are not such 
as the soul need refuse to obey. Speaking in the first 
person, it cannot be said that we feel a compulsion which 
our inmost conscience rejects. When men bring an in- 
dictment against Providence, it is because they see that 
the allotment of natural good and evil in the world is not 



352 



NATURAL LAW. 



proportioned to the moral deserts of individuals ; and they 
say in their haste, The ruler of the world is unjust. And if 
we reply that, on the contrary, the world has no ruler, and 
that its vicissitudes follow each other in a fixed course, 
determined by the natures of co-existing things, they re- 
peat the charge with a difference, and say, Then the laws 
of the world are unjust. The above pages have been 
written in vain unless we have shown that just laws do 
not exclude unequal fortunes; that the constancies of 
relation prevailing among the heterogeneous facts of 
nature are the condition not only of natural stability, but 
of all natural life, growth and enjoyment ; that the law 
may be " holy and just and good," while the imperfection 
of the things subject to the law may — by virtue of the 
general laws, which it were a loss to repeal — work pain 
and evil, not only to the imperfect thing itself, but to its 
unoffending fellow-creatures. The laws of human life are 
not unjust to individual men, though the administration 
of the law in an imperfect world may bear with unequal 
severity upon some ; and though nature, as a whole, does 
not acknowledge a responsibility towards the human 
species in the matter of rewards and punishments, it 
cannot be said that man, in his merely human relations, 
is the subject of unjust laws because obedience to the just 
laws to which he is subject is not always for his temporal 
advantage. We are no more subject to unjust laws than 
to an unjust lawgiver ; we are free to do or be the best we 
can, for anything the universe cares to the contrary ; all 
the natural laws of which we own the sway are on the 
side of reason, justice, progress, and perfection, and we 
distinctly do not feel a permanent pressure from the 
nature of things urging us to dishonesty, cruelty, or mis- 
conception ; our will is not irreconcilable to the strongest 
tendencies of nature, which we feel to be towards natural 
and spiritual good ; they leave us free to see and tell the 
truth, to love peace, and follow after righteousness — 
whether we do so or not is another matter, but the char- 



CONCLUSIONS. 



353 



ter under which we hold our life from the universe secures 
us in these good and sufficient liberties. 

But here, mayhap, some gloomy young agnostic inter- 
rupts : Out on all these canting, conceited sycophants of 
creation! Have we not read the sober Mill, the cynic 
Schopenhauer, the refined Eenan? What of the suf- 
ferings of man and beast, rampant brutality, abject 
fear, remorseless crime, and incurable pain? Shall we 
praise a natural law which brings forth all these fruits of 
hell ? Humanity forbid ! "We had no thought of praising 
nature, though few of these miseries are the work of her 
laws ; they come from the natural imperfection of things, 
which is such that if we had the choice of being unborn, 
not a few of us, perhaps, might be glad to seize it. But 
what, pray you, brothers malcontent, does it prove against 
the morality of the laws by which moral agents live, that 
you or I or the raw-boned donkey of an ill-conditioned 
costermonger, are not providentially supplied with the 
means of gratifying our most lawful appetites, nor even 
with opportunities for displaying our specific excellences 
and developing our specific gifts ? Is the good of life less 
good because it is unequally distributed ? Do those plea- 
sures cease to be desirable which you or I desire in vain, 
or those powers cease to be admirable which we find no 
pretext for admiring in ourselves ? 

Shall I blaspheme reason because I am no Spinoza, art 
because I cannot draw, music because I have no ear for 
it, the beauties of nature because I am shortsighted, the 
charms of society because I stammer, athletic sports if — 
like Hamlet — I am " scant of breath " ? Shall I disparage 
political liberty because I have no vote, political power 
because my constituents preferred the local brewer, the 
delights of friendship because he thinks me a bore, the 
sweetness of love because she married somebody else, the 
glory of success because you do not read my book ? Though 
I am poor and dyspeptic, shall there not be cakes and ale 
for the well-to-do with an appetite ? The law of love is 

z 



354 



NATURAL LAW. 



good and joy-giving, yet I may waste my life in mad de- 
pendence on a Delilah's face ; truth is good, yet there are 
scientific bats who, in the name of truth, banish love and 
beauty from their lives because they cannot be prepared 
for the microscope ; strength is good, though when we set 
the wheel of action rolling, it may break from our grasp or 
drag us with it whither we did not mean to go. But it is 
not law, only awkward fact that determines our concrete 
ill-luck ; the laws are good laws to live by, and we owe 
them no grudge because you or I may fail to live fortu- 
nately. The strongest forces in nature are those which 
struggle towards unseen heights of natural good, and I may 
own as much, though my own short life be irretrievably 
spoilt because I have not found a place to suit me in the 
service of the forces ; there were round holes and square 
on the board, but if I was born a scalene triangle, what 
does it prove against the rules of the game ? 

Say I have set my ambition too high, sought a field for 
potent action and to act worthily of the field, and foil 
back into heartbroken discontent because the field itself 
had to be fought for through ignoble chicane, and by the 
time it was almost won, the power — if I ever had it — to 
act effectively was lost : — what then ? If the field is cleared, 
some one else will have a better chance than I, and some 
cf those who have a better chance may be better able to 
use their chance. I have failed, and that is ill, so far as it 
goes ; others may succeed, and that will be well, by compa- 
rison ; and " in the name of all that's relative," why should 
we torment ourselves because there is no place for terms 
of absolute eulogium in the history of our experience ? 
After all, it is almost a law, a very wide generalisation 
indeed, that we all get, on the whole and in the long run, 
whatever we want most, for if we only want hard enough, 
circumstances give in to us at last. If I wanted truth 
more than happiness and innocence more than enjoyment, 
nature and her laws have done me no wrong : they that 
seek find, and to him that knocketh shall be opened — at 



CONCLUSIONS. 



355 



least the gate of content and resignation, if that is what 
he wants most. 

This is the best and worst of it as regards the single 
soul: righteousness is possible, and so is misfortune, 
spiritual as well as temporal. But for that immaterial 
body that we call society, there is no worse evil than the 
misfortune of its members, and the best that we can say is, 
that such misfortune may be brought to a minimum by 
the intelligent action of society in all its parts. Natural 
evil will probably last as long as natural life ; when men 
have done their best for themselves and for each other, 
pain and loss and benefits out of place will still keep 
human hearts versed in the art of aching. There is little 
to choose in the matter of happiness between the pain of 
bereavement and of unsatisfied craving; but though the 
object of our effort is to make possession the rule, and either 
kind of painful exception as rare as possible, while human 
life continues as we know it, so long happiness will be, as 
it were, the narrow line — as hard to tread as Mahomet's 
bridge — separating the two boundless deserts of want and 
misery. But still men find their way across the desert 
now, with all the chances of ill-luck, ill-will, and stupidity 
against them, and the aim of society is to put the chances 
on their side. It has been said: The dice of God are 
always loaded ; and it rests with men to load the dice in 
their own favour, to multiply the influences tending in 
favour of good fortune, so as to allow the possibilities of 
good to encroach upon the region of blind, impartial 
chance, and cause an increasing part of human life to 
be determined by conscious will, and less and less by the 
mechanical sequences of unfeeling, unintelligent nature. 

The supreme power, named by Spinoza JDeus sive NFatura, 
owns no duties to the human race, and though man has 
owned duties to the Supreme — and why not if then* dis- 
charge be natural and good ? — our concern is with the 
duties of men to each other, and it is still a new and some- 
what startling conception that the claims from this quarter 



.356 



NATURAL LAW. 



may be as infinite as the demands of any imaginary creator. 
On the one hand, we seek for a sufficient reason for the 
incessant exercise of each and all of our vital powers ; on 
the other, we are half afraid of acknowledging the force of 
the one omnipotent and omnipresent motive which pre- 
sents itself. We own a duty to our neighbours, and the 
good Samaritan still stands high in our esteem, but popular 
ethics avowedly shrink from the admission, which would 
stamp our living practice with condemnation, that our 
duty to our neighbour is — we hardly dare to write it — to 
do all that in us lies to enable those with whom we are in 
constant relationship to live the best life they can, and to 
live meanwhile the best life we can, as a duty, first indeed 
to ourselves, but then also to those with whom we are in 
contact, and lastly to society in general, or the unknown 
members of its mass whom our actions and being may in- 
directly influence. It is a tremendous proposition that we 
are bound to do all the good that we conceivably can, that 
every misfortune which we can in any way alleviate has 
a claim on us for help, and that the life of every man is 
to be held under conditions imposed by the needs of his 
fellows, that, in fact, there are no degrees of obligation, 
and that the same reasons which would seem now suffi- 
cient to make it right to render a cheap and easy service 
to a friend, also make it right in case of need to render 
arduous and self-denying services to the stranger that is 
within our gates ; that duty is co-extensive with ability ; 
and that, while the distinction may be maintained between 
sins of omission and sins of commission, all deliberate omis- 
sion of a possible act clearly seen and believed to be good 
is to be classed, and reprobated, and avoided as a sin. 

It has been said that this is too hard for flesh and blood, 
and that we are dishonest in continuing to accept the tra- 
dition of an obligation which we do not seriously think of 
satisfying. Secular morality, it is urged, must moderate 
its demands to suit the moderate limits of human virtue 
and capacity; and since there is no dens ex machina to 



CONCLUSIONS. 



357 



enforce devotion to a divine ideal, men must be left to the 
sway of personal human motives, which only exact a finite 
and tolerable measure of self-denial. But, on the other 
hand, though we say that the God in whose name men 
have clung to an ideal of perfection is but a dream of 
the mind, a shadow of the will, giving them no real help 
in their endeavour, the fact remains that men have owned 
the infinity of duty, not as a dream or shadow, but in 
living truth, and if men have sought perfection before noiv 
without receiving superhuman help in their search, shall 
they in these latter days turn with open eyes to a less 
worthy goal ? To say they must, is indeed a godless — say 
rather a soulless creed; to say they will, is false and faithless. 

And when it is accepted, the tremendous burden of social 
obligation lightens itself at once, for it is borne in common. 
If, indeed, the duty of every man and woman be as full 
and searching as we tremble to think it, the future before 
them may be happier than we ever dared to hope ; for the 
law that is binding on one is binding on all ; every small 
service that is rendered, every small obligation that is 
fulfilled, may be repaid a thousand-fold. While the 
one owns duty and service to the many, the many can 
give still more potent help and guidance to the one, not 
only lightening the objective difficulty of his tasks, 
but reconciling the spirit to his obligations by the flow 
of unselfish sympathy. The one renders to society such 
small services as he can, and all society in return is at 
the bidding of his wants ; and in truth, society has less to 
gain by the perfect life of its several members than they 
have to gain by a social order which would let them live 
perfectly, for human opinion is the atmosphere breathed 
by human agents^ and as the air they breathe, so their 
health and strength of limb. Perhaps, after all, society 
asks no more from its members than to make a wholesome 
atmosphere for each other — not one breeding agues of in- 
decision, fevers of envious discontent, and epidemics of 
quarrelsome greed. Xo one doubts his own power to live 



35§ 



NA TURAL LA W. 



innocently and wisely, if all his neighbours would show 
him how, and a sanitary reform in the region of thought 
and feeling modifies conduct for the better, even without 
consciousness of effort. 

But though the discharge of social services may profit 
alike the givers and receivers, the services on both sides 
must be a gift, and not a matter of sale and purchase ; for a 
rigid counting of the cost is fatal to the moral life, as the 
lack of intellectual daring and generosity is fatal to all 
natural energy. It is true, though the fact proves nothing 
against the supreme naturalness of virtue, that there is no 
certain assurance that he who does most for his kind will 
receive most help from them in his need — only a general 
certainty that the harvest is according to the seed, and 
that each addition to the number of those who have done 
what they can lessens the gross weight of evil and mishap 
which prevents even the best of men from doing all that 
they would. 

But there is one last objection to be met: If earth is 
turned to heaven by the reciprocal good offices of mankind, 
who will be content to leave it ? and is it not a cruel mercy 
to reconcile men to a life they must quit so soon ? We are 
no optimists, and our wildest dreams do not go beyond a 
hope of making untimely death once more the worst enemy 
of the living. Persons who have only lived out half their 
natural life on earth look to another world for compen- 
sation, but it may be that those who, while it was time, 
have filled their consciousness to overflowing with the 
experiences of a sympathetic energy, satiate themselves 
with existence so, and have no desire left for immortality. 
Those whose energy has been productive, who have !livecl 
much, and over-lived much, who have tested the limits of 
their powers, and see to the end of the work which it is 
possible for them to do, they, in the fulness of years and 
attainment, sing, we may conjecture, their Nunc Dimittis to 
the Universum with at least as much feeling of relief as of 
reluctance. 



CONCLUSIONS. 



359 



If people could think of themselves as immortal with 
the immaterial eternity of geometrical truths, they would 
have no reason either to desire or to dread a posthumous 
existence. But, in fact, of all our acquired tastes, the taste 
for living for ever is the one which will be found least 
deeply rooted amongst men, if for no other reason, because 
it has never been strengthened by indulgence. No mortal 
knows whether a resurrection to eternal life -would answer 
his expectation or not, but many good people are at pains 
to explain that they could not take their own souls au 
serieux, unless they believed them to be immortal, and we 
have no wish to cavil at the means by which so necessary 
a result may be obtained ; only, looking at things dispas- 
sionately from without, the misgiving arises, whether our 
own respect for the human soul would stand the strain of 
seeing our good neighbours produced to infinity. If man's 
duration were not as finite as his good qualities, he would 
need infinite tolerance to endure his own presence through 
the ages. 

The kind of immortality that may be certainly antici- 
pated, and that influences the present action of living men, 
is not personal but material. The desire for fame, subjec- 
tive immortality, is reasoned away as easily as that half of 
ambition which consists in the desire to be thought of as 
great, powerful, or in any way illustrious ; no one on re- 
flection cares to be admired by fools, and the admiration of 
the few competent judges whom a candidate for greatness 
finds among his contemporaries is exactly proportioned to 
his real merits ; but though it follows from the nature of 
the case that good work is appreciated by those who know 
what is good, the least part of the motive that actuates 
those who are able to do good work is the knowledge that 
it will be appraised at its true value by a few. The suffi- 
cient reason for any act is a clear and adequate apprehen- 
sion of the act as good to do, which makes the doing of it 
appear as an end in itself, whether the deed is applauded 
and the doer remembered or not, for these are accidents 



360 



NATURAL LAW. 



lying beyond the power of the individual will to control, 
and wise men do not place their happiness at the mercy 
of contingencies. To be remembered is not an end. We 
are not the better now for what generations still unborn 
will think of us, if we have the power to make them think 
at all ; it is they who will be the better for our thought of 
them. Our present desire is not for an idle fame, but for 
the triumph of the truths and tendencies which have been 
the guides of our action — not the less so because the 
triumph of a cause is followed by the dawn of new truths 
and tendencies, whose champions will then have more right 
than our ghosts or tombstones to honour and praise among 
the living. It is enough for us to know that what we have 
done, be it less or more, will in any case live in its natural 
effects, and that, whether it knows the fact or not, the 
future will be, within approximately calculable limits, as 
much the better as we may have chosen to make it for our 
action on the present. 

Life and death are equally natural, and neither is a pure 
good, neither an unmixed evil. The Stoics asked, " What 
good is it to the bubble while it holds together, and what 
harm when it is burst ? " and we can only answer, that to 
live according to nature, and to die a natural death, is the 
sum of all the natural good we know or can think of as 
attainable by man. " Things without life, and things with- 
out reason, and things that have rambled and know not the 
way," have less of natural excellence in them than the man 
of strenuous and temperate virtue, who is constantly faithful 
to his true self and to the impressions of the Not-self by 
which his inner life and being are conditioned. More than 
this the resources of thought and language do not allow us 
to maintain or suppose. If it is asked what healthy, vigor- 
ously-minded men, with plenty of desires of their own, 
riding rough-shod over weaker tendencies, have to do with 
the doctrine of natural necessity and the praises of univer- 
sal perfection, the answer is easy, for they have not much. 
Men who are swayed by simple personal desires, untroubled 



CONCLUSIONS. 



361 



by religious doubts and moral perplexities, live almost 
automatically the less complex, we do not presume to say 
the lower, — perhaps the happier — life of irrational nature, 
of roses, brambles, turtle-doves, or tigers, as the case may 
be ; they are under the law of the land and of opinion, 
but they have naturally little concern with the gospel of 
religious morality. If they, too, are moderately good of 
their kind, it is not from the vague hope they sometimes 
believe themselves to entertain of being by and bye trans- 
formed, by a power not themselves, into beings of another 
(how can we say a better ?) kind. Such hope is not, in 
most cases, lively enough to be efficient as a motive, but if 
it were so, then certainly the fact that men can live well 
and cheerfully by the help of anything so immaterial as 
hope deferred, proves that not much immaterial help is 
needed to carry the majority of them through the material 
troubles of life. Of its immaterial troubles, two of the 
most intolerable, fear and disappointment, have no power 
over the enlightened reason and the chastened will. We 
do not fear what is certain ; we succumb or endure. Dis- 
appointment only comes to those whose hopes have been 
unreasonably high or unreasonably confident, and to lose a 
false hope of the future does not make men less able to 
face a present reality. 

Heaven and hell are names or visions ; the earth is ours 
— here a hell of sensuality and hardened cruelty, there a 
heaven of love and beauty and wisdom, with a tender smile 
upon her gracious lips, and yearning prophecy in the melt- 
ing depths of her unfathomable eyes. 



( 



ADDENDA. 



A. — Page 15. 

It is right to be on one's guard against too comprehensive or sym- 
metrical theories, and it was with some hesitation that the writer 
accepted the above classification. But though a symmetrical scheme 
is dangerous if it is conceived first, and the facts then made to fit 
it, there is nothing necessarily suspicious in a symmetry which 
springs from a natural parallelism between the several relations 
of men. The homologies of life are like the homologies of organi- 
sation ; the order of the parts repeats itself in the order of the 
whole, because the order of the whole is developed under the same 
formal, though not the same material, conditions as its homologue. 
There is, however, another objection which may more fairly be 
made : our outline includes much more than the reader will find 
detailed and satisfactory foundation for in this essay. The object 
here proposed has been rather to indicate the relation between the 
various phases of spiritual subjection common in human experience, 
than to give a full account of the growth and nature of either one — 
let alone all — of these. The psychological antecedents of moral 
feeling, for instance, have hardly been touched on here, the subject 
would require a volume to itself, and, moreover, a volume that 
can hardly yet be written, because the physiological antecedent 
and attendant conditions of the elementary facts of psychology 
have not yet been adequately analysed and grouped. The history 
of social relations has been only alluded to, and the history of 
religious thought in its later developments passed by in silence. 
These and many other omissions, the comparative importance of 
which may be differently estimated, but which cannot fail to be 
observed, are not due to any doubt as to the importance of the 
themes passed by, but to the writer's conscious inability to do them 
justice here ; questions connected with all these points must and 
should suggest themselves, and the discussion, no doubt, is wanting 



3 6 4 



NATURAL LAW. 



in artistic completeness when the suggestions are not followed up 
at length. But on the other hand, it is a mistake to overlay the 
proportions of a simple sketch with the innumerable details 
belonging to each several object in the view. The sketch at least 
may be correct as far as it goes. The finished picture waits the 
hand of an inspired master. 

B. — Page 43. 

The fundamental assumption is that things possessing different 
defined qualities exist. The laws of existence for these things state 
the constant relations which the actual combination of properties 
known as thing A, thing B, and C, make necessary for thing C, D, 
&c. The nature of a thing is a conception abridged from its 
phenomenal history — which is only a history of relations, necessary 
and accidental. The actual difference between natural laws and 
human laws rests upon the fact that only the simplest things are 
infallibly constant in any relations ; complicate and multiply the 
relations, i.e., complicate the things, and you multiply specimens of 
imperfect approximation to the natural type. It is as if we were 
to suppose gravitating bodies to move, as a mean, in the assumed 
track, but not without infinitesimal swerving to right or left. As it 
happens, all matter is equally subject to the law of gravitation, and 
we observe no aberrations that cannot be accounted for by the attrac- 
tion of other bodies seen or unseen. But almost with the first step 
towards specialisation this universal conformity ceases. A slight 
atmospheric check or chemical disturbance may cause a crystal to 
take an abnormal form, but the laws of crystallisation enable you to 
predict the normal form that will be produced under given condi- 
tions. Our idea of what constitutes a normal man is much more 
vague and loose than a crystallographer's definition, because the 
legitimate variation of individuals of the class extends much 
further, while the characteristics of the class itself are far from being 
exhaustively known and placed. Nevertheless, we on the whole 
agree in assuming that there is a human type, a certain average 
degree of approximation to which is normal, and a more than average 
divergence, abnormal. "We have a rough practical notion of what 
we expect an average man to be : he is not colour-blind, and has 
some ear for music, a good appetite, a sound digestion, and enough 
energy to wish for some employment ; he is moderately conscien- 
tious, that is to say, he believes about as many things to be right, 
and as many wronp. as the majority of his neighbours, though he 



ADDENDA. 



365 



need not always agree with the absolute majority of them as to 
which is which. He will have a certain minimum of beliefs in 
common with the overwhelming majority who disapprove of 
murder and stealing, and he will not be inclined to justify, at the 
same time, all the special lapses from exact virtue which are 
tolerated by different classes, e.g., if he defends adulteration, he will 
not approve of pigeon-shooting or duelling ; if he thinks duelling 
necessary, he will consider avarice or slander wrong, while some 
indulgence in covetousness may be compensated by zeal against 
Sabbath-breaking. To an average quantity of the sense of duty, 
add moderate susceptibility to the domestic affections, though here also 
the distribution of the tenderness is open to variation, and a man 
may care more for his mother than for his wife, or for his wife than 
his children, while an indifferent daughter may make an excellent 
mother, or conversely, without prejudice to their claim to rank as 
ordinary human beings. Add to this a certain amount of disin- 
terested curiosity, and a power of understanding any clear statement 
of fact and relation, save two or three to which the gate of the 
intellect is blocked by a prejudice, inherited or acquired, and our 
conception of the average man is tolerably complete. Now when 
we say that positive law formulates the practice of the average or 
normal man, we mean that the mass of individuals, roughly sketched 
in the above outline, follow certain rules in their civil and political 
relations, which rules follow as necessarily from the habitual desires 
and impulses of individuals as any other natural law from the 
natural properties of things. It does not belong to the definition 
of the "normal man" that he should obey the Institutes, or the 
Code Napoleon, or the Common Law ; all these systems are merely 
descriptive of the normal relations of each average or ordinary man 
with the rest. The laws observed by a given community follow 
necessarily from the physical, moral, and intellectual habits and 
inclinations — or, in more general terms, from the nature — of its mem- 
bers, civil law standing to social development in the same position 
that the laws of nature or the physical properties of things do to 
natural life or animal growth. But the "nature" of the men of 
any particular generation must not be identified with a supposed 
"human nature" as definite and unchangeable as the nature of 
water or marble. Laws change and the moral ideal changes, but 
at any given moment both are the necessary outcome of the existing 
relations of existing men. The race struggles towards a formula of 
really necessary uniformity, but different generations become aware 
of different conditions, modifying, enlarging, or restricting the 



366 



NATURAL LAW. 



possibilities of lawful conduct. The " truly normal " action is that 
which ignores no objective condition, and therefore possesses the 
elements of real permanence. 

C—Page 57. 

In answer to the question how we should determine whether a 
tendency which seemed permanent was also normal, I should say 
that the test of conditioned/less might be relied on. A permanence 
that results from an accidental absence of change is not to be called 
normal ; we must know by experience or reason that the apparently 
permanent teudency is fixed or determined by the substantial nature 
of all the things coucerned before we can incorporate its manifesta- 
tions in our idea of the type. 

J).— Page 75. 

Concerning the association of the inward sense of obligation 
with a certain kind of constraint, we should decidedly distin- 
guish between the sense of legal and the sense of moral obliga- 
tion. In both cases a simple-minded man says, "I must," but in 
the first case he feels the compulsion of an external pressure, in the 
second that of an inward bias. Historically, in the matter of law, 
he feels obliged to do what his fellow-men agree in demanding ; 
psychologically his feeling is deter min ed partly by a spontaneous 
sympathy with the fitness of the demand, and partly by the con- 
sciousness of its existence as a real and present force ; the will of his 
fellows being there, the man cannot act as if it were not ; it is itself 
a fresh condition serving to determine and modify his action. 
When we are being efficiently caused to do something which does 
not stimulate desire, if the cause is efficient, we feel ourselves being 
obliged to do something that we dont wish, and that is the very 
consciousness of constraint referred to. Of course, not all constraint 
is moral or legal, but the peculiar feeling of acknowledged obligation 
arises naturally in the case of restraints that are one or other, be- 
cause a sane man shares the feelings of his fellows about lawful 
action, while in morals the whole self is conscious in a massive way of 
the bias given it by its whole history, and nine-tenths of the man 
remain acquiescent in the general tendency, even when the remaining 
fraction is carried away by the strength of a local passion or desire. 
But the real justification of the attempt to place moral laws on the 
same footing as natural physical constancies must lie in the observa- 
tion that the specific nature of anything is incomplete and unde- 



ADDENDA. 



367 



veloped so long as its action under known circumstances continues 
to be incalculable. Human nature is still in the rough ; it is still 
adapting itself to circumstances, and still developing new suscep- 
tibilities necessitating fresh adaptations. But we might al ready- 
venture to say that a man who murders his mother for a few francs 
is as much an abortion of a man as any animal or vegetable 
"monster" preserved in a museum of curiosities. Mill half com- 
plains of " unnatural " being still used as one of the most vitupera- 
tive words in the language ; but the connotation is reasonable 
enough if we understand by " nature " not so much what exists of 
its own accord without deliberate modification as what exists by 
fundamental necessity, the broad specific distinction of quality that 
makes A=A and nothing else, not the accidental results to A or B 
of their actual historical juxtaposition. The " nature of things," 
which is respected as not only permanent, but somehow as having 
" a right " to be permanent, is only that constitution of A, B, C, &c, 
which the whole alphabet has agreed to tolerate and certain related 
groups to enforce. 

E. — Page 93. 

Nothing can be further from the writer's wish than to echo 
the unjust and misleading criticisms of Utilitarianism as necessarily 
a selfish or a materialistic creed. It is rather because Utilitarian- 
ism seems to have lived down its unpopularity, and even, in a rather 
vague and incoherent form, to have taken rank as the official 
doctrine of the slightly educated masses, that its philosophical in- 
completeness seems to become dangerous. Of course most so-called 
social utilitarians would put forward as the goal of human effort the 
true good of the race ; as they would place the highest happiness 
of individuals in the enjoyment of pure affection and great 
achievement. But they are weighted with the assumption that what 
they and we think right now is only right if, or as long as, human 
effort or Divine providence continue to cause the right to be felicific. 
I agree with a social utilitarian as to the substance of the moral 
law ; but if I didn't, on what ground could he, say I ought % Sup- 
posing I argue that a man's first duty is to himself, and that if he 
cannot attain the fullest development for his own nature without 
making victims, he has a right to victimise if he can ? The utili- 
tarian says this is wrong, because the good of many is worth more 
than the good of one ; but what does it mean to say that the one 
" ought " to think so % I say the man who does not in the main 
feel with us is imperfect, the utilitarian says wicked, but I can't dis- 



3 68 



NATURAL LAW. 



cover that "wicked" means anything except indifferent or hostile 
to the greatest happiness of the greatest number. If pursuit of the 
greatest happiness of the greatest number is virtue, and virtue is 
only pursuit, what is the use of having two names ? It may be a 
serviceable generalisation to say active, universal benevolence is 
right, i.e., useful ; and if this is always right, whatever fosters its 
growth and facilitates its exercise will be right — i.e., useful — by 
implication too. But though the popular conception of virtue in- 
cludes all this, I deny that it includes no more. The feeling 
which is admitted on all hands to exist, in the majority of men, 
with regard to the moral qualities of acts, does not seem to be 
sufficiently accounted for by a reference to their consequences either 
to the agent or to the persons affected by the action. An act 
otherwise indifferent does not become wrong because the doer is 
told that he will be sent to Coventry or sent to hell for doing it. 
Mill himself, utilitarian as he was, declared that if a bad god had 
power to send him to hell, to hell he would go rather than obey the 
evil one, and this, 1 conceive, without any reference to a further 
hypothetical possibility of thereby encouraging the subjects of the 
bad god to dethrone him from the skies. An act otherwise right, 
i.e., in conformity with the best energies of man, does not become 
wrong or indifferent though it may have no tendency to increase the 
happiness of the race. The difference of opinion may be called un- 
practical, since it would only affect conduct in a contingency that 
neither party regards as practically possible. Still there are a few 
conservative pessimists who incline to think mankind so far gone on 
the road to perdition that its greatest happiness can be no longer 
found in virtue, only in the discreet selection of the pleasures to be 
enjoyed, the duties to be neglected. Utilitarians may agree with 
perfectionists in denying the possibility of such a dilemma, but 
supposing for a moment that, in the decrepitude of the race, a few 
men had the choice of being stoned for their efforts to delay the 
fated triumph of evil, or of joining the multitude to hasten its reign, 
I still believe that the unthinking mass of mankind attach a mean- 
ing to the word " right" according to which it is wrong to " give place 
to the devil" even though righteousness has as little prospect of 
eternal as of temporal rewards. Utilitarians in this extremity say 
there is no inducement, and therefore no sufficient reason for doing 
what has been called right, if no one is to be the happier for it here 
or hereafter. The perfectionist says there is a motive, and therefore 
an efficient cause, for right doing, as long as even one righteous man, 
in the imaginary Sodom, feels within himself the love of justice, 



ADDENDA. 



369 



kindliness, and enterprise. Here indeed it may be said, that if a man 
love virtue for its own sake, his personal happiness lies in its 
exercise, so that it is as much for his happiness to resist the stream of 
evil as it is for another man's to follow the same. But even if we 
put the self-pleasing of virtue and of vice on the same footing, an 
ethical theory is still bound to supply a test according to which 
we may say which form of self-pleasiug " ought " to be cultivated 
among men. And supposing the evil generation to be more indo- 
lent than malicious, so that it would rather go without prophets 
than have to take the trouble of stoning them, even though the 
righteous man may consult his own pleasure in provoking martyr- 
dom, he is still, on utilitarian grounds, wrong in resisting the 
evils of his age if it once appear that the evils are irresistible. 
It is only when we come to this last extremity that the prac- 
tical sufficiency of utilitarian morality can be impugned. But even 
in ordinary conjunctures it makes a good deal of difference to 
the tone of moral speculation whether we professedly make the 
limits of duty contingent on the good-will and good-luck of each 
generation, or whether we claim as an inalienable possession every 
particle of the accumulated sense of obligation handed down by the 
growing scruples of the whole past, and include implicitly in our 
conception of what " ought " to be done every logical development 
of our present admissions. The objective force of the motives that 
have hitherto acted in favour of what we call virtue will remain the 
same, and if human susceptibility to these motives becomes less, 
mankind changes for the worse ; but the moral law cannot be 
perpetually revised so as to suit our backslidings. 

~F.—Page 128. 

The power of names is a danger : " social " is a word so easily 
written, and surrounded with so many indefinite associations, that it 
can hardly be too seldom used without precise and express limita- 
tion. Nearly every word in which a long and long-lived train 
of thought is summed up becomes a danger to thought as soon as 
the summary is accepted, and the word begins to pass current as a 
symbol, without a present intuition of its real value. Even the 
word "right," to which we have endeavoured to assign a precise 
and intelligible meaning, is always in danger of being used meta- 
physically, as if the name, which we gave deliberately to certain 
objects of thought, were appropriated by an entity, and served only 
to designate, not to define. It is not profitable to talk about " the 

2 A 



37o 



NATURAL LAW. 



social sentiment " as a something that will regenerate society some- 
how without the co-operation of its members ; it is only a name for 
the impulse of some of those members to regenerate their own 
surroundings. And there is in the same way something unprofit- 
ably metaphysical in the ready answer to all who question why they 
should perform a given duty ; — " Because it is right." That is not 
the real reason — it is right because of this or that concrete motive 
which we do, or but for exceptional perversity should feel to be a 
sufficient reason in this one case. The existence of a rule is not 
the ground of its obligatoriness ; that is due most often to the 
very same causes as determined that. Among men of normal 
sensibilities the mental processes may vary in the presence of a 
practical moral problem ; for some, the general rule remains always 
present to the reason as something final, accepted once for all, and 
to be acted upon without question, and to these the rule stands in 
the place of a reason, though it cannot be a reason in itself ; to 
others, the motive for each particular right action lies in the 
strength of a special moral feeling appropriate to the case in point — 
a feeling of tenderness for the pain to be relieved, of sympathy for 
the want to be supplied, of acquiescence in the claim to be discharged. 
The right rule is only a generalisation from innumerable such 
cases ; the facts determine the nature of the law, not the law that 
of the facts. As a matter of speculation, it is perhaps most impor- 
tant to insist on the generality of the rule, especially when it is said 
that there can be no binding rule ; but as a matter of practice, too 
much reliance on the shorthand of a rule tends to degenerate into 
formalism, and its precepts may be carried out into would-be 
logical developments that may come to have no bearing on the facts 
of experience. And thus, even while recognising the complete 
sufficiency of any moral rule as a guide for action, it seems expe- 
dient to fix the attention rather on the present inducement — the 
primary motive of human feeling which gave a foundation to the 
rule — rather than on the bare precept. A reason that is felt has 
more power than one that is only understood or believed in. 



G. — Page 203. 

Granting that people have equally by nature what we are 
accustomed to call a worse and a better self, we find they may 
either believe, with the theologians, that the latter comes from 
Adam's fall, while the former is the gift of God ; or, with the 
materialists, that both alike are the fruit of natural antecedents, 



ADDENDA. 



37i 



themselves by nature respectively bad and good. Now if the better 
nature were not only the gift of God, but from time to time rein- 
forced by Divine support, we may admit that people who received 
such support would find it easier to be good than those who did not. 
But this is begging the question. If this Divine support is only 
another name for the sum of wholesome influences which act on a 
well-natured man, he loses none of it by discovering whence it 
really comes. Such support is equally available for the theologian 
who gives it one name, for the rationalist who gives it another, and 
for the sceptic who doubts its existence. Those who believe that 
Divine assistance is granted them do not find it always or evidently 
profitable to do what we all agree in calling right ; in practice they 
fail — as secularists fail — when temptation is strong, resolution weak, 
and the feeling which would make right doing involuntary either 
wanting or wilfully deadened. In practice secularists succeed — as 
theists succeed — in acting according to their conscience, when habits 
of rectitude and the strength of generous feelings outweigh the pre- 
sent temptation to a guilty act or a base abstention. Very few per- 
sons at all, and no habitual sinners, have a sufficiently lively faith in 
the reality of hell or heaven for their conduct to be influenced thereby 
to moral self-denial. There is an external and a very powerful influ- 
ence at work fixing the minds of the majority to the conclusions sug- 
gested by their own nature and circumstances — the influence, namely, 
of concurrent human opinion ; and it is perhaps impossible at any 
given moment to decide how much of the practical good behaviour 
of men is due to their own instincts, how much to their instinctive 
deference for the feelings of their kind. But the feeling or opinion 
of the kind is nothing but the feeling and opinion of individuals with 
the personal egotistic elements eliminated, and the respect which 
men habitually feel for their own opinions when thus reinforced is 
no greater than they may be expected to feel when the consent of 
other men stands to them as a symbol of the consent of all the 
natural tendencies which culminate in humanity. With regard to 
the sanctions of theology, men are overawed less by their own belief 
than by the idea that other people believe ; and if we suppose 
true opinion to be reinforced not merely by the general consent of 
mankind, but by all the natural conditions which inspired the 
assentj it can scarcely lose in imposingness. 



PRINTED BY BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO. 
EDINBURGH AND LONDON 



